


LOHAC

by applecrumbledore



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Minor Violence, Recreational Drug Use, Smoking, Speciesism, Young Adults, rap/hip-hop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-04 18:26:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1084243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applecrumbledore/pseuds/applecrumbledore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave is a local rapper starting to make it big, Sollux is his DJ, and Karkat is a stressed out, sexually confused university student who's experimenting with as many things as possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. headless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my first multi chapter davekat fic! there's a few other minor pairings but nothing graphic or erotic or even really romantic about them, so I wouldn't count them as ships in this context. so don't worry if you don't like them, I guess.
> 
> the idea is that it's a modern, city AU where trolls and humans live alongside each other, but there's speciesist tensions and social segregation akin to racial tensions in the US in the mid 20th century, and dave's a rapper by the name of LOHAC that plays to almost exclusively 'alternian' crowds. karkat's dating terezi but they start going to see dave's shows and ~stuff develops~. 
> 
> if you don't like alcohol, club drugs, or rap/hip-hop this fic might not be for you. anything dave raps is an actual song and not something i wrote, and will be credited at the end!

“We never go out.”

“Hm?”

Karkat looks over at her. Terezi’s lying backwards over his bed, looking at him upside down, her wiry hair pooling on the floor. He was taking things off his bookshelf so he could move it to grab the comic that had fallen behind it, and sits surrounded by a small city of book towers.

“We don’t go out,” Terezi says again, not mad. More matter-of-fact.

“Well, it’s raining.”

_“_ Not today,” she laughs, “like, always. We just hang out in your room, or my room.”

Karkat sits up and looks at her. “Not always. We’ve gone out plenty of times! To the movies and shit, and Kanaya’s place. I wouldn’t say _never_.”

She rolls her eyes and flips onto the floor, pushing her hair out of her face. “Don’t you ever want to party?”

Karkat tries to pull the bookshelf away from the wall, pulling his sweater down around his hands so he won’t get a splinter if he slips. Rain pounds harder at the room’s small window, punctuated by the scraping of tree branches. 

“I do, but it’s expensive. Drinking is expensive, and the people are loud and stupid and the music’s never good.”

Terezi hums, leaning forward. She dances her fingers across his shoulders. “I’ve got some money. So, what if I said we could go somewhere where I _know_ the music’ll be good?”

He snorts, smushing his face against the wall to see behind the bookshelf. “I’d call you a fucking liar.”

She huffs and sits back against the bed, kicking her feet out. “You remember Sollux?”

“From high school?” 

“Yeah.” She pauses. “I don’t think the book's down there.”

“I saw it fall! I’m not gonna let it stay back there until it’s been so long I forget and I end up buying a new one some day.”

“Check the second shelf.” 

He does.

“So, Sollux,” she continues. “Yeah. He’s DJing now.”

Karkat sputters. “That’s hilarious. _That_ guy?”

“He’s not that bad! We were friends in school.”

“Oh.” Karkat pulls the comic out from where it was wedged between two other books, having fallen down the back but not to the bottom. He looks over at Terezi. “Yeah, I guess we were. So?”

“ _So_ , he’s playing a show downtown tonight. You wanna go?”

He looks at her for a long time, sitting on the scratchy carpet of his room on a Friday afternoon. She isn’t wearing a bra so he’s looking at that but he’s also looking at her face, trying to gauge her tone. 

He doesn’t want her to think he’s boring. He doesn’t want to be the boring pre-med-student boyfriend she gripes to her friends about. He’s bad at drinking and even worse at dancing, but he doesn’t want to be bad at dating. “Where is it?”

“That place on West Second, Headless.”

“Jesus.” He knows that club through word of mouth, and it is a _club_. A dark, pulsing, boozy, trendy club. But, at the very least, it’s a predominantly Alternian club. Not many humans go there. “Good for him, I guess.”

“He seems pretty excited about it, it’s all over his Facebook. He DJs for some guy he knows, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“He does the music for his friend, who raps. I forget his little rap name or whatever. He’s human.”

“That’s weird.”

“What is?”

“Rap, in general.”

Terezi bursts out laughing and fists her hands in the front of Karkat’s sweater, and he stumbles into a kiss. 

“You are so deliciously square,” she grins. “This is gonna be fun.”

 

Karkat has to wear a t-shirt and isn’t happy about it. He keeps pulling on the sleeves like that’ll make them longer, but he also insisted on not wearing a coat because he didn’t want to pay money for coat check. Kanaya was happy to come with them despite her apprehension about the venue, and they’d been drinking at Karkat’s house for the past couple of hours. They would have invited Nepeta, but they didn’t want Equius to come.

Terezi’s warm little hand in his, arm linked with Kanaya’s on the other side and walking down the wet sidewalk glowing in the dark, Karkat has to admit: he doesn’t feel bad. It isn’t that he doesn’t like to drink, he just feels stupid and weird and isn’t good at going out. The being drunk part is the part he’s okay with. 

He wants to make Terezi happy, though, knowing that if he doesn’t go out with her she’ll find someone else to take her. He honestly wants to have fun.

“Do you think he’ll be any good?” Terezi asks.

“Sollux?” Kanaya says. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him—I can’t imagine what he’s like now, let alone his music. But, I’m sure he’s very good.” She hums. “It has only been two years.”

“I’m more worried about the guy he’s up there with,” Karkat laughs. “I don’t even know the last time I heard good rap music.”

Terezi elbows him in the ribs and says, “You’re just listening to the wrong stuff. I’m excited!”

It’s past ten. The people who pass them, both trolls and humans (though mostly humans in this neighbourhood) are bubbly and drunk and well-dressed to go out on a Friday night. Even Karkat can’t help but feel a little giddy. Maybe clubs aren’t so bad. That kind of anxious, bubbly excitement was hard to find anywhere else.

After waiting huddled in the spitting rain in a slowly-moving queue, they show their IDs to a beautiful human girl at the door and go up a flight of stairs into the club. Karkat can hear the music already and it’s so bizarre—not _bad_ bizarre. Deep and loud and churning like hitting pipes together, like heartbeats and gongs and sort of bubbly and a steady, pulsing electronic beat. 

And, loud and into a microphone, someone rapping.

Karkat can feel the beat of the music in his eyeballs and immediately says, “This is a bad idea,” but Terezi has already grabbed Kanaya’s arm and is pulling her into the room, babbling excitedly. 

He steps slowly into the room. It’s a small open space with wood floors and colours and pictures swirling on the walls, bright projected images, dark and hot and full of mostly Alternian girls, and some human girls, which is interesting—when a club is a “troll club,” it’s usually a pretty hard and fast rule. There’s no real segregation laws and it would be illegal to enforce anything so blatantly speciesist, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t social rules in place that are just as binding. So to find human girls at a troll club is saying something, and not that you’d ever find Alternian girls at a humans-only club. They wouldn’t stand for that.

There are guys, too, but not half as many, and everyone is so _good looking_. Girls in big tank tops with long, dark hair, painted horns, bright lipstick. The bartenders are all female, human, and intimidatingly beautiful. Everyone is intimidating, and Karkat’s already lost Terezi and Kanaya.

But he’s looking up at the stage.

He’s just tall enough to see over the heads and horns of the mass of bodies moving in front of the stage, dancing and bouncing to the music—and there’s someone up there. A human, crouched at the front of the stage with a cordless mic in his hand. Rapping to the girls in the front row.

_“—all the cholos sayin’ mira el joto, just because I rock the second hand Versace—”_

He’s short and has greyish blonde hair stuffed under a black toque, and he's wearing black sunglasses even in the dark of the club.

_“—the second hand couldn’t even clock me. You couldn’t see me like a Cuban playing hockey—”_

He holds the mic against his lips and his voice is steady and fast, and he grins this cocky grin like he can’t stop smiling, like he’s drunk, and he probably is. The girls reach for him, and he lets them.

_“Words come through me like I was a walkie-talkie, all I do is open up my mouth and just rock, see—”_

The soft grey hand of an Alternian girl stretches from somewhere in the crowd and strokes the side of his curved nose, down to a black nose ring. When the girl’s hand runs over his lips, he stops rapping to nip her fingers.

_“You, you are not me, me I am possibly everything plus everything that is not me—”_

Then there’s a hand on Karkat’s shoulder, a voice yelling over the music into his ear.

“Isn’t this _awesome?”_

It’s Terezi. Karkat jumps, grins, and kisses her, and she’s laughing into his mouth. Kanaya is behind her, smiling and a little uncomfortable to be in such a crowd but happy, moving to the music.

Terezi points a finger to the stage. “Look, it’s Sollux!”

Karkat can see Sollux up behind the blonde kid. It’s only been a couple years since high school but God, he really grew up. Tall and all edges with a sharp nose and a long face, swimming in a giant black t-shirt. He’s swaying and moving in front of a giant mixing board and two precariously balanced laptops, a pair of headphones askew and only over one of his pointed ears. Hands moving and tapping and twisting things in a rhythm only he knows. Like the rapper, he’s wearing those red and blue sunglasses of his even inside, probably the same ones from high school. 

“He’s _so_ good!” Terezi gushes, and Karkat doesn’t know if she’s talking about Sollux or the guy rapping. He shifts uncomfortably anyways.

And then the beat changes, holding its own. And it isn’t bad at all. It’s actually really, really, good. The kid is done and stands, laughing, moving his toque back off his head and back on, laughing into the mic. His shoulders are wide and sloping, Adam’s apple sharp and throwing a shadow from the spotlight down his throat. He isn’t very tall, or doesn’t look like it from down here.

“Everyone havin’ fun?” he asks, surveying the crowd. The girls go nuts. Terezi hoots. The hands of the girls at the front reach up again and he reaches his own out to meet them, skipping along painted fingernails and claws. It’s not a huge space and there can’t be more than a hundred people here, but everyone here is up at the front, bouncing, dancing, calling at him. 

He laughs again, like he’s surprised. He’s wearing a grey crewneck sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows and torn, straight jeans. They’re rolled up above his running shoes and you can see his black socks. 

“As some of you may already know,” he goes on. He speaks precisely but lazily, like each word just falls out of his mouth exactly when he wants it to. “My name is LOHAC, thank you for coming here and letting me rap at you tonight.”

LOHAC. Karkat feels like he remembers seeing it on posters, maybe on campus with the scores of other illegible paste-ups for shows around town. He’s still standing by the doors with Terezi and Kanaya, wishing he had a drink to have something to do with his hands.

“I’ve got a couple more tracks for you then I’ll let you go, I promise.” He fiddles with the mic.

Laughter and boos over the music. 

“Alright, alright, maybe more than a couple. I’ll stay ‘til they make me leave.”

Cheers, laughter. The beat changes. He nods, moves, laughs again. He goes to the mixing board and grabs a beer sitting on the top and raises it, and Sollux lifts his own bottle from somewhere and they clink cheers and down them. He looks at the crowd again, grinning.

“And let’s hear it for Sollux, okay? No one does this like him.”

Girls whistle and cheer and Sollux grins, sharp teeth flashing. He moves his hands and the music chirps loudly, twitters like a bird. The beat changes again, fast and rhythmic and buzzing lowly. It has a distant, low singing to it, like a children’s choir in the gravelly, electronic beat. LOHAC’s at the front of the stage again, bouncing on the balls of his feet. When he starts to rap, he moves his hands and it’s fluid.

_“This little piggy got a house made of bricks, hand over hand over hand over fist—this little piggy got a house made of bricks, huff and puff, bitch, you ain’t blowin’ down shit!”_

The crowd starts churning, cheering, dancing. People put their hands up, and the music gets louder.  Terezi shouts, “Let’s get drinks!” and Karkat smiles and lets himself be tugged towards the bar by her laced fingers. When Kanaya looks at him he mouths, _oh my God_. Sweat shines on her throat and he’s glad she came with them—besides Terezi she’s Karkat’s best friend and he loves her, but she can be so uptight. And coming from Karkat, who’s pretty uptight himself, that’s saying something. He hopes she’s having fun. 

_“Headlocking the block, tryin’ to squeeze all the juice out, damn right money talk, if that money talk too loud gag order the vote, cut Benjamin’s tongue out—dead presidents run mouth, get left spittin’ blood out—”_

Karkat’s burning hot even in a t-shirt, distracted by perfume and mouths and Sollux’s infuriatingly danceable music, bass so deep it’s shaking the walls, and LOHAC’s voice is even and fast. He moves across the stage, bending into the crowd. He’s holding his beer in the hand that isn’t holding the mic.

_“Go so hard in the paint, I stuff it—bust a nut in the bucket, run amok on you fuckers, piss and cuss up in public, my come-up ain’t one to fuck with, not for nothin’ you nothin’—”_

Terezi’s pushing a glass into Karkat’s hand, clinking it with her own. It’s got a little black straw in it, which he picks out and throws on the ground. He likes seeing Terezi so happy, drunk and sweaty and pretty, and really, it’s not as bad as he thought. Sollux makes good music, however he’s doing it, and the other guy is ... certainly something. Certainly popular with the girls. 

_“Stop and sample the block and you snot rockets—got this flip phone and some work in the jeans, that’s hot pockets—Fresh out the car wash, still got a dirty trunk, out for that gold plaque like a set of dirty fronts—”_

They’re moving up closer, Kanaya and Terezi swaying, dancing with each other, watching the stage. Karkat doesn’t dance because he doesn’t know how, but he sort of sways, grateful for the drink in his hand. He’s one of a handful of guys at the show, and accidentally makes eye contact with another guy standing at the bar before looking quickly away. It’s weird to be at a show that is so obviously supposed to be appealing to women, and he wonders why that is. Skinny, blonde, white rappers aren’t supposed to appeal to men, he figures.

_“This little piggy got a house made of bricks, hand over hand over hand over fist—this little piggy got a house made of bricks, huff and puff, bitch, you ain’t blowin’ down shit!”_

He's grinning, bouncing, wagging his empty beer bottle at the crowd. He looks genuinely surprised when a girl holds up a new one for him, and he trades her. He blows her a kiss and stops rapping to drink. People hoot and laugh. He crouches and puts his microphone on the floor, then raps into it lying down next to it, face pressed into the wooden boards of the stage. His shades go askew. The crowd goes nuts.

_“Making tall orders, taking no shorts—how’d that little guy get on such a high horse?”_

He stops and the beat drifts goes on, then drifts off, changes. There’s laughter, energy, girls grabbing for him at the front. Still lying down, he picks up the mic and rolls onto his back.

“Thank you, guys. I lied, I think we’re done here.” 

He sits up and his hair hangs into his eyes, dishwater blonde. How he can see with sunglasses in the dark is beyond Karkat, who’s watching him carefully. He can hardly see in here himself, just magentas and greens from the lights swirling and pulsing over the dance floor. He sucks his drink and watches Terezi dance, pretends like he isn’t trying to dance himself. She’s wearing a t-shirt with the neck cut out and a tight, shiny bandeau underneath, and when she moves he can see it flash. She grins at him like a shark, and they kiss.

LOHAC goes back behind Sollux’s mixing board and puts an arm around his neck, saying, “Give it up for Sollux, alright?” and everyone screams. When Sollux laughs you can hear it over the mic. He’s a head taller than LOHAC and the arm around his neck drags him down.

“Thanks, everyone,” he says, and Karkat barks a laugh when he remembers his lisp, the same as it always was. He’s sweating, hair stuck to his forehead and he slicks it back. 

The two of them leave the stage together, dropping down behind a little staircase leading to some unknown. Then the music changes, not Sollux anymore but something else, a track playing over the speakers. The lights change and the show is over, but the club is still going hard. People stream for the bar or turn away from the stage, girls dancing in these big, giant masses of smooth arms and flowing hair and jewelry. The night’s still young.

Terezi turns to Kanaya and says something, bouncing with excitement, and Kanaya claps her hands and almost spills her drink. Terezi cups her hand against Karkat’s ear and yells, “Let’s go see him?”

“Who?”

“Sollux! C’mon!” 

He’s led through the crowd by her hand, sliding between people in her wake with Kanaya in front of her. There’s a huge Alternian bouncer standing in front of a hallway closed off by a black rope, his shoulders as wide as Karkat and Terezi put together. He looks down at them.

“Can we talk to Sollux?” Terezi asks him, yelling. He bends down to hear her. 

The bouncer shakes his head.

“We went to high school with him, we wanted to say hey!” When he looks skeptical, she says, “No?” And he shakes his head again.

After a couple minutes of the three of them standing there trying to figure out what to do that Sollux comes down the hallway, stepping over the black rope. The front of his shirt is wet with sweat and he’s grinning, nodding thanks to the bouncer. His hair is cut short but still somehow messy. 

Terezi bounds up to him and he doesn’t recognize her for a second, but when he does he jumps and throws his arms around her, laughing.

“Holy fuck, Rezi! It’s been _ages_ , what the _fuck?”_ When he straightens up he sees Karkat and yells. “You’re kidding!” he laughs, and Karkat laughs, drunk, and they hug. “I’d’a thought it’d be a cold day in hell when I saw fucking _Karkat_ at Headless. How’s it going, man?”

“Great!” he says, honestly. “You play one mean fucking ... laptop.”

Sollux laughs and claps him on the back. He’s a foot taller and Karkat lurches forward, almost spilling his drink. He tosses the rest back while Sollux hugs Kanaya, and she ruffles his hair. 

“Man, you guys gotta come chill with us! Wait here, I’m getting drinks.” 

They watch him swim to the bar between an impressive number of girls touching his arms, his back, leaning in to talk to him. He gets delayed by a tall girl with poker straight hair—he signs her forearm with a ballpoint pen and gets a phone number written on his own in return.

He comes back with a whole bottle of gin, looking at the number on his arm.

“That was new,” he says, bewildered. “Musta been a good set.” When he goes up to the rope, the bouncer unlocks it and lets them follow Sollux in. “C’mon, there’s a whole thing downstairs here. You can meet Dave.”

“Dave?” Karkat snorts, and Sollux laughs over his shoulder. The hallway is painted black and poorly lit, and turns down into a narrow staircase. 

“LOHAC,” Sollux corrects.

Unlike the hallway, it’s all whitewashed backstage. There’s a set of black leather couches and square pillars all around the room holding the ceiling up, and a big coffee table in the centre. There’s a giant metal bucket on the table full of melted ice and no beer. Sollux drops the gin in it and it makes a loud noise. 

LOHAC, evidently _Dave_ , jumps. He’s sitting at one end of the biggest couch with an Alternian girl in long black socks in his lap. Her hair is big and curly and her horns curl back like a ram’s. There are other guys and girls standing around behind him—all dressed startlingly well and beautifully, better than anyone upstairs—on the other couches and leaning against the walls; other than Dave, no one’s human. There’s music playing from somewhere, similar to what was upstairs.

He looks at Karkat, Terezi, and Kanaya. It’s hard to tell if he’s surprised behind his shades.

“Hullo.”

He definitely has an accent, Karkat decides. Not a strong one, but there’s something about the way he speaks. His speaking voice isn’t the same as when he raps, but he couldn’t say how.

Sollux flops down onto an adjacent loveseat and beckons the three of them to follow. Terezi skips over, tugging Karkat, and they sit on the other end of the couch Dave is on. Kanaya sits next to Sollux.

“Hey,” Sollux says, to get his attention. “These are my friends from high school. Everyone, say hey.”

The three of them say _hey_. Dave laughs and reaches out from under the girl with the ram horns, extending his hand towards Terezi. His forearms are as white as the moon.

“LOHAC,” he says, and shakes her hand.

“Terezi. You were _so_ good.”

“Thanks!”

“It’s _Dave_ ,” Sollux snorts. “Don’t try and impress them, you douchebag.”

“Rappers go by their stage names all the time! When was the last time anyone called Biggie _Christopher Wallace?”_ He leans forward more to stick his hand out to Karkat and the girl falls half out of his lap. “Dave.”

Karkat shakes it. His palm is warm and sweaty and his hands are a little bigger than his. He’s wearing one black ring. “Karkat.”

He sees pale blonde eyebrows rise briefly above shades. “Nice to meet you.” He looks at Kanaya. “I’m too far away to shake your hand, but pretend I shook it and said my name.”

Kanaya extends her hand and shakes the air. “Kanaya.”

Dave laughs.  The girl in his lap shakes Terezi’s hand, too, and waves to the rest. “Aradia.” Her voice is high and silvery. “Nice to meet ... everyone.”

Sollux reaches for the gin in the bucket and cracks it open, looking at Terezi.

“So, what’ve you guys been up to? We kinda lost touch, huh?”

“Yeah, totally,” she says, leaning back into Karkat. He puts his hand on the inside of her thigh, trying to get his heart to stop beating so fast. “I dunno, we’ve been good! We’re working, Karkat’s going to school.”

“What are you in school for?” Dave asks him. 

If he were any less drunk, he would have been uncomfortable because he isn’t used to meeting new people, much less humans. Much less than that, even, people comfortable with being on stage in front of a crowd of hundreds. But as it is, he just shrugs. 

“Pre-med.”

“So, what, you wanna be a doctor?” Dave asks.

“Oncologist.”

Dave nods, smiles. “I get that. Cancer or whatever, right?” 

“Yeah.”

Dave looks at him for a long moment. Down his black t-shirt and slim gray jeans that are too long for him and high tops. Terezi is talking to Sollux, who’s putting the number on his arm into his phone. 

“You don’t look like an oncologist,” Dave notes, lips twisting into a smile.

His jaw is sharp, lips a little full for a guy. Very pale, but maybe that’s just him being human. His shades swallow his face, to the point that it’s hard to tell what he really looks like. He takes his toque off and throws it on the table, rubs his flat hair. It’s long enough to almost dip into his eyes. Karkat glares at him.

“Yeah, well, you don’t look like _you_ could do it.”

Terezi hears this and smacks his arm. “Hey, don’t be rude.”

But Dave just laughs. “Yeah, fuck, no. Scraping through high school was bad enough, you got me there. I’m dumb as a brick.” There’s a pause. He’s got his arm around Aradia, fingers tapping her hip. “But I’d bet my life you can’t do what I do, either.”

Karkat’s ears go red. Sollux is passing around the bottle of gin, no chase. Kanaya sips it, makes a polite face. Before Karkat gets it, he thinks, _don’t get too drunk_. But then when it’s there he takes a deep gulp and hisses, passing it to Terezi, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Dave is still looking at him.

“No,” Karkat admits. “Obviously.”

“How’d you like the show?” Dave asks. He’s grinning that grin he did on stage, stuck somewhere between cocky and sheepish. Karkat notices that he touches Terezi’s hand when she passes him the gin, or she touches his, either by accident or design. He bristles.

“I dunno,” he shrugs. “I wouldn’t know if it was any good, I don’t go to this kind of thing.”

His grin widens. “I can tell.”

When Karkat opens his mouth to speak, and not nicely, Terezi cuts in.

“It was _awesome_ , that was so cool.” She jiggles in place. “I haven’t been to anything like this in so long, it was great.” She turns to Sollux. “You never told us you were doing shows!”

“You didn’t ask!” He laughs. “You should come hang out more, since it looks like you’ve learned how to party. I mean, if you guys are into this kind of thing.”

Kanaya makes a funny noise, smiling. The gin has made it back around to her and she plays with the bottle in her hands. She must think it’s as funny as Karkat does that the three of them would know anything about this scene. 

Karkat’s watching Dave, his ears flat. He’s smiling at Aradia, who’s tugging at the collar of his sweater with her claws. Are they dating? He wonders. That would be something—it happens, sure, and way more than it used to, but interspecies relationships aren’t that common. And not exactly accepted, either. This makes it all the more interesting that Dave would be here, playing to a room full of Alternian girls, and playing with one in his lap.

And, of course, it makes Karkat nervous. Because Terezi’s an Alternian girl, and obviously impressed with Dave and his stupid rapping. So Karkat slips his arm around her and to his relief, she snuggles into him. He tries to get his head to stop spinning.

Dave’s talking. Karkat picks the accent out as a twang, something southern. Appalachian, or around there. 

“We do shows every week or two, or whatever? You guys can come if you want, lemme know and I’ll put you on the list. Any friends with stories about how awkward Lux was in high school are friends of mine. Oh, wait.”

He lifts his hips to squirm a Sharpie out of his pocket, Aradia slipping off his lap on top his other side, legs lying across his. Her thighs are undoubtedly bigger than his; for every bit of scrawny he is, she’s twice as lush. She’s very pretty. Karkat feels like he knows her from somewhere, but can’t remember where. Maybe she goes to his university.

Dave reaches out over her knees and takes Karkat’s arm in his hand. Karkat jumps.

“Hey, fuck off!”

“Here.” On the inside of his arm, Dave writes ten neat numbers before Karkat can snatch it back. Everyone laughs. “Text me.”

Karkat flushes and glares murderously, cradling his arm. He looks down at the number, small but crooked and facing the wrong way to him. 

“I don’t want your fucking phone number, shitstain!” Karkat snaps, and Dave just laughs at him.

"You say that like I give a fuck,” he laughs. He leans forward with his hands on Aradia’s thighs and peers at Terezi on Karkat’s other side. “Terezi, right? Get that number before he scrubs it off and come hang out with us next week.”

Terezi beams, blushing teal across her nose and cheeks. Maybe that’s from the alcohol and was already there, Karkat isn’t sure, but he doesn’t like it. Dave motions for the gin from Kanaya and she passes it politely; when Karkat looks over at him he’s got his head tipped back, drinking it. Karkat can smell the juniper from where he’s sitting, still thumbing the number on his arm. It doesn't smudge. 

He’s conflicted. On one hand, he has to admit—it’s been kind of fun. He liked the music and _fine_ , even the rapping was okay, and it’s good to see Sollux again. And, _okay,_ it feels pretty fucking cool to get to go backstage, even if it was to hang out with this dick. And Karkat is pretty sure that Dave or LOHAC, famous or not, is a dick. And he's not even _famous_  famous, just local famous, if even that, so whatever. He doesn’t like what _better not_ _be_ his interest in Terezi. And he’s insufferably smug, but Karkat expected as much. It goes with the territory.

They talk and drink for a while longer, people coming and going on the couches around them, before the bouncer comes down and tells Dave there’s a crowd twenty girls deep waiting to talk to LOHAC. 

Dave laughs. “No shit? This was a fucked up show.” He yawns and Aradia slips off him, and he stands, pulling his toque back on. “Sollux getting numbers, and did you see that chick stroking my face on stage? Fucking insane.” He looks down at himself. “This must be a really, really nice sweater.”

Karkat’s exhausted, forty minutes of gin past ‘too drunk,’ but he watches Aradia and she just takes her phone out. She’s not at all phased by Dave going to meet girls or getting stroked on stage, so maybe they aren’t dating, he figures. But Dave does lean down and kiss her on the head, and says something. She smiles but doesn’t look up.

Dave says, “You coming?” to Sollux, who thumps the bottle in his hands down on the stable and hauls himself to his feet. He towers over Dave and, just for shits, knocks the toque off his head. 

“Fuck, yes. Let’s embarrass some impressionable young women.” Sollux is heading up the staircase while Dave fumbles for his toque, all smiling and toothy and drunk. He shoves it back on his head and turns to the three on the couch as he’s leaving.

“You can stay as long as you want, help yourself to whatever.” He snaps his fingers and points, maybe at Terezi but maybe at Karkat, they’re all too drunk to tell. “And call me.”

And then he’s gone thumping up the stairs, his bright sneakers flashing for a second before they disappear into the ceiling.

They’re quiet for a second, listening to the voices still murmuring, talking, laughing around them from the couple groups backstage who haven’t left yet. Terezi’s lying with her head on Karkat’s shoulder, falling asleep. He checks his watch; it’s almost two in the morning. How have they been here for so long?

Kanaya looks over at the two of them, lying slumped against each other.

She says, “I think he liked you.”

At the same time, both Karkat and Terezi say, “Me?” and Kanaya laughs.


	2. the scratch

 

Karkat wakes up the next morning hung over but surviving, exhausted and late for class. Yesterday’s rain has pushed back to a clear, cold day, and he squints out the window of his shitty studio apartment at it with disdain. His jeans are by the door but he’s still wearing the same shirt from last night and it smells like sweat and sloshed booze.

He stuffs his backpack and runs out the door to make it in time for his second lecture, un-showered and sick to his stomach. He doesn’t remember the number written on his arm until he goes to push the sleeves of his sweater up an hour later.

He looks down at it.

_Right_.

It’s facing the wrong way and he twists his arm around to read it.  LOHAC’s phone number, above the club stamp smeared on the inside of his wrist. Or _Dave’s_ phone number, rather. Dave ... he didn’t tell them his last name. He didn’t seem particularly eager to tell them his first name, even. What a weird fucking dude.

He slumps down in his seat and tries not to fall asleep during lecture, running his fingers through his greasy hair. Looking at the number. 

Dave is a bad idea. He was a jerk. He seemed stupid, and almost rude. Probably a womanizer, because isn’t that a _rap_ thing? And obviously, for some fucking reason, he’s into Alternian chicks. Karkat has no idea how he’s doing that, but he couldn’t have had so many at his show, _exclusively_ , by accident. 

Karkat decides not to to mention it. He resolves not to. It’s an uncomfortable situation to be living in, but Alternians are kind of ... they are and _aren’t_ fetishized, at the same time. It depends on the situation. It seems like most humans can’t get themselves far _enough_ from Alternian relationships because of quadrant romance, but some dare. Usually—as noted by Alternian rights groups everywhere—humans in relationships with Alternians force them to have a monogamous relationship and _very_ rarely attempt quadrants themselves. Over time, more and more Alternians have adopted the human definition of love, even in relationships with other Alternians, with quadrant romance being slowly phased out as traditional and backwards. Rights groups call this a loss of culture, but it’s quickly becoming the norm.

The funny thing is—and Karkat has learned this from having too many conversations he didn’t want to have, a lot of them with Sollux during high school—there are certain Alternian-human relationships that are most common, despite Alternians being more or less hermaphroditic; and not all humans know that, anyways. Mostly, you see human girls with Alternian guys. And, as Sollux pointed out (grinning widely) there are reasons for this. Sexual reasons, he said. Alternian guys like humans because they can suck dick, which Alternians can’t and _don’t_ do because of their teeth. 

And according to Sollux, human chicks have some ‘weird fascination’ with Alternian dick for reasons he got into excruciating detail about before Karkat started chanting and covering his ears. He said you see more human _girls_ with Alternian guys specifically, because humans observe gender more than Alternians do, so if human guys are with Alternian guys, it’s _gay_ , and that’s a thing. Same with girls. So you just see less of it, Sollux had explained.

Karkat had rolled his eyes at this, to which Sollux had asked if _he_ would ever date a human guy. Karkat admitted he wouldn’t, and when asked why, he said what most of them did: _because they’re so fucking weird about it._

So while there are guys who are specifically into Alternian girls despite the teeth (and Sollux had pointed out: _believe it or not, some fucking_ love _the teeth_ , and Karkat had winced) it’s not that common. Not in practice, anyways. But Dave had definitely seemed to _practice._

Karkat hadn’t been around many humans until university. Their neighbourhoods are largely segregated, but unofficially: birds of a feather flock together, and you end up with human districts and ‘troll’ districts, workplaces, schools. 

(Karkat doesn’t know when exactly the word _troll_ came into use, and he _personally_ doesn’t mind it—it isn’t a slur, and mildly impolite at best—but he knows people who do. You still hear it all the time.)

So Karkat went to an Alternian high school, but his university is largely human. If he looked harder, he’d notice that he gets some questioning looks. He tries not to look any harder than he does.

Again, that makes Dave an anomaly. Humans hanging out with trolls is by no means _taboo_ , far from it, but it’s still uncommon. And in his case, it’s even more uncommon for a human to venture into troll territory, to play at a troll club to an almost all-Alternian crowd.

Obviously, this makes Karkat extremely suspicious. What’s Dave’s fucking deal? He assumes it’s some gross fucking fetish and wants to leave it at that, but it really makes him not want to hang out with him again, more for Terezi’s sake than his own. He doesn’t want her to get _preyed_ on by this asshole, but it’s more than that. They’ve been going out since freshman year of high school, but he’s never been able to shake the feeling that she’s looking for something he can’t give her. He’s always stressed about school, always busy, and so fucking uptight. He knows this. It’s unnerving to know that if she’s looking to fill in his gaps, she’d be looking right at Dave—some smarmy showboat who probably gets drunk off his ass every night, wild and idiotic without a care in the world. 

He’s kind of scared of losing her to some cocky human _rapper_.

Halfway through the day, Terezi texts him. No pretense, no greetings. When he fishes his phone out of his pocket it’s right there on the screen.

\- _D1D YOU T3XT LOH4C?_

He sighs. 

_\- NO, FUCK THAT GUY. HE WAS PROBABLY JOKING TO MAKE US FEEL STUPID SO WE CALL HIM AND HE’LL BE LIKE, OH, YOU THOUGHT I WAS SERIOUS_

\- _H3 W4S COOL, H3 TOT4LLY M34NT IT. 1T WOULD B3 FUN TO CH1LL W1TH H1M_

_\- IF BY FUN YOU MEAN LIKE GETTING YOUR FUCKING TEETH PULLED. WE HARDLY EVEN TALKED TO HIM, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK HE’D BE ANY FUN?_

_\- H3 R4PS._

Then, a second later. 

\- WHY 4R3 YOU B31NG SO W31RD ABOUT TH1S >:?

Now he’s nervous.  He doesn’t want her to know he’s thought about this—letting your girlfriend know you’ve thought about her cheating on you is never a good move, and he’s not stupid. He doesn’t want to mess this up.  So he texts back, hiding his nerves better.

-  _SORRY. I’M HUNG OVER. MY PHONE’S ABOUT TO DIE, I’LL TEXT HIM TONIGHT._

And his phone really is about to die, so he stuffs it into his jacket pocket and spends the day thinking about what he could possibly have to say to Dave.

 

It’s not until he’s back in his apartment that he ends up texting Dave. Hunched on his bed, phone attached to a charger in the wall, he types and re-types it a couple times.

_\- HEY. IT’S KARKAT, FROM HEADLESS LAST NIGHT. YOU TOLD ME TO TEXT YOU._

It’s straight and to the point, but it doesn’t give too much away. He doesn’t want to sound like he’s actually interested, anyways. He’s doing this for Terezi.  Dave responds a minute later while Karkat’s still sitting with his head in his hands, trying to force himself to feel less sick.

  * _oh sup hows it going_



Then, a moment later.

  * _i cant believe you actually texted me im touched_



Karkat grits his teeth. He toes his shoes off and lies back on his bed, sheets twisted up underneath him. If he tells him that Terezi asked him to, he’ll think she’s into him. Somehow, that’s worse than the alternative—Dave thinking that he actually wanted to contact him. 

  * _OH FUCK YOU, YOU’RE LUCKY I DON’T WRITE YOUR NUMBER ON THE BATHROOM WALL._
  * _like id care if you did. why does your number have a weird area code_
  * _IT’S THE OLD ONE._
  * _woah they changed that ages ago, are you from around here?_
  * _YEAH, SO WHAT?_



He blinks down at his phone. Why would he care? It’s a big city, a lot of people were born here. But maybe Dave wasn’t.

  * _ARE YOU GUYS DOING A SHOW THIS WEEKEND OR WHAT_
  * _yeah on friday night at the scratch. im having a thing before it if you wanna come though_
  * _WHAT KIND OF THING?_
  * _well its more luxs thing but whatever you can come. booze and drugs and general debauchery at his place if youre up for it_



Karkat can’t tell if he’s kidding, and he isn’t sure if he wants him to be. When he types back, it’s very slowly.

  * _WHAT DO YOU MEAN EXACTLY._
  * _god what are you 14?? chill out, whats the worst that could happen? you actually have fun?_



He sighs and drops his phone on his chest. His head feels like someone’s cleaving it down the centre. It’s almost so bad he wants another drink just to make it go away, but he’s not going to be that guy. He’s got shit to work on today, actual responsibilities. Unlike Dave, he thinks.  But, Christ—when was the last time he actually had fun? If he isn’t in class or doing assignments he’s working. He has a part time job at a bookstore near the port, which gets him enough money to scrape rent together every month and have a bit left over. His grades are good enough to make scholarships to cover his tuition, but none of that leaves much time for actual fun, involving drugs and drinking or otherwise.

He sits up and rubs his hair. He stares down at his phone. Two very childish feelings are welling up inside him: wanting to impress the girl he loves, and not wanting to be outdone by this jackass. So his answer is just as childish, but it gets the job done. 

_\- HERE’S WHAT COULD HAPPEN: SHUT THE FUCK UP. WE’LL BE THERE. GIVE ME THE ADDRESS._

And he does.

 

Terezi is thrilled to go, even after Karkat tells her about the possibility of ‘drugs and general debauchery.’ He’s never been able to tell exactly how far Terezi would go when it comes to that kind of thing—he knows she likes to go out and drink, but drugs are a different story. He knows she hasn’t experimented with much more than he has, or that’s what she tells him, and they smoked weed in high school (because who didn’t?) and still do, but rarely. It isn’t hard to get but it isn’t cheap, and neither of them has much money. Karkat doesn’t mind. He always gets too stoned at parties and ends up paranoid and uncomfortable, shoved into the corner of a couch trying to figure out how to speak again. 

He’s never done anything beyond that, but it’s not that he doesn’t want to. It just hasn’t come up. He wouldn’t know what to get or how to do it, and it’s not like he has any connections, so he isn’t against it, just anxious and nervous and a weird sort of excited that makes him wary. He doesn’t like being excited, it’s a vulnerability. He stays up all night googling the effects and dosages and risks of different club drugs, wondering what they might end up doing. 

He doesn’t text Dave again, and Dave doesn’t text him. By the time Friday rolls around, he’s worried he made the whole thing up and hardly remembers what Dave looks like. But he scrolls back through his texts for Sollux’s address and, along with Terezi a head full of useless drug trivia, he heads out for the night. 

Terezi’s had a bit too much to drink, but that’s okay. He’s always impressed by how well she handles her liquor, but it’s impossible to not notice that someone is plastered when you’re almost sober. Not that she’s obnoxious, but she’s definitely had a couple drinks, grinning, chatting loudly and excitedly. It’s cute.

The night is clear and warm and Karkat pulls the sleeve of his sweater down over his hand, the one that isn’t holding Terezi’s. Sollux doesn’t live in a great neighbourhood, but it’s one they’re both used to being in and the streets are alive with people, mostly trolls, which makes him feel better and less anxious. He wouldn’t have pegged Sollux for living in a human neighbourhood, anyways. He bets Dave doesn’t, either.

He nervously rubs the back of his neck and stops Terezi before they go up the front walk to a small, squat house. The lawn is all moss and there’s a light on around the left side of the house, where Dave said to go. Sollux lives in the basement. 

“Wait.” He puts his hand on her arm and she blinks at him. They’re almost the same height. She’s wearing a bit more make up than she normally does, and she looks gorgeous. “I don’t know what’s gonna happen, so let’s just, like ... agree to stick together, alright? If you want to leave, just say, and we’ll leave.”

She surprises him with a kiss, laughing. “You’re cute. You know if one of us wants to go home, it’ll be you.”

He doesn’t want to smile but he does, ushering her down the walk. “Whatever. Humour me.”

The door to Sollux’s suite is down a cement staircase tucked along the back of the house, wet with soggy, dead leaves. Karkat can hear music when they’re standing at the bottom and he knocks hard three times, Terezi’s forehead hot against the back of his shoulder.

Dave answers the door.

He’s wearing those fucking shades again, you can hardly see his face—but he’s grinning at them and Karkat can’t tell if it’s happy or cocky or both. He’s not wearing a toque and his hair shines white-grey in the one eerie light above them. His giant, thin white t-shirt shows his knobby collarbone and hangs almost to his elbows. Karkat didn’t remember him being so skinny, and he can’t be much taller than Karkat himself, who isn’t tall to begin with. Something about him being on stage made him seem so big, but he’s not. He looks shorter without a hat.

“You made it,” he says. 

Karkat decides the smile is cocky. His mouth is dry from the beer-and-a-half he had, the half left on his kitchen counter because maybe he was a little anxious to get here. And now that he’s here, part of him wants to leave. The part that’s still extremely wary of Dave.

“You told us to.” Karkat’s voice is deadpan but his fingers are buzzing. He scratches his claws on his palm and looks over Dave’s shoulder into the house, an empty hallway.

“And you listened.” Dave steps out of the way and beckons them in with a stupid flourish. “ _Mi casa su casa_.”

“I thought this was Sollux’s place?” Terezi asks.

“It is. Well, _his_ casa su casa, then. C’mon.”

They toe their shoes off by the front door. Karkat looks at his black-on-black chucks next to two big pairs of high tops—one bright and shiny, the other dirty white and beat up—and he feels stupid, somehow. Terezi is bouncing after Dave down the hallway and he follows them. There’s a ripped up band poster on the wall next to a framed painted landscape, the meaningless kind of art you get at thrift stores. He doesn’t understand Sollux. The ceilings are low and the air smells musty and cold. 

They follow Dave into a living room where Sollux is stretched on a floral-print couch, feet crossed on a low coffee table covered in beer bottles and water rings where beer bottles used to be. There’s an empty bottle of Mountain Dew and what looks like a bag of gummy bears. It’s a weird mix between a frat house and a nerd den. Sollux is playing some video game Karkat doesn’t recognize, and  looks up at them quickly but doesn’t pause. 

“Well, bless my nippers, look who it is.” He’s wearing a big black t-shirt, a thin gold chain around his neck and ratty black jeans.

Dave flops down on the couch next to Sollux, leaving two seats open: a third place on the couch and one on the armchair next to it. Karkat thinks quickly—if he doesn’t sit next to Dave, Terezi will. He sits next to Dave and the couch sags under them.

“What, were we supposed to _not_ come? Are we crashing your _raging party_?” He gestures to the empty room.

Terezi laughs. “Yeah, no kidding, this looks like a snoozer. Is there anyone else coming?” She looks to Dave as she sits heavily in the armchair and tucks her bare feet up. The claws on her toes are painted cherry red.

A thin, pale eyebrow raises above Dave’s glasses. 

“Nah, this is special. I don’t go on ‘til like midnight.”

“So, what, we’re just staying here until then?” Karkat looks at his watch; it’s not even ten. He doesn’t try to keep the skepticism out of his voice. 

This time, Sollux pauses his game. He arches his butt off the couch to squirm something out of his back pocket. It’s hard to tell what expression Dave is making with those stupid shades, but his teeth are showing—it’s either a grin or a grimace.  Sollux tosses a tiny white ziplock bag onto the table.

It was a grin.

“Oh!”

Karkat can’t tell if Terezi is a regular sort of surprised or an upset sort of shocked, and there’s a difference. But she’s already taken the flask of whiskey out of her jacket and has taken another swig, so maybe her tone doesn’t matter anymore. She’s grinning like a shark.

Before he can think better of it, Karkat asks, “What’s that?” and feels instantly stupid. 

But Dave doesn’t make fun of him. 

“MDMA.”

He leans forward and picks it up. It’s a little plastic bag significantly smaller than his palm, full of something that looks like sugar, except very slightly off-white. 

But then Karkat says, “What does that stand for?” sounding absolutely put-off, and Dave starts laughing.

“You’re fucking hilarious.” He flips it in his hand. “I have no idea. Something-something...”

“... Methylamphetamine,” Sollux finishes for him.

“It’s _meth?”_ Terezi leans in, eyebrows drawn, and passes her flask very seriously to Karkat, who takes a gulp. 

“Christ, no.” Sollux has stopped playing and looks at them now, leaned back on the arm of the couch. “Not like, crystal meth. Not the bad shit. It’s an upper, they’re all amphetamines.”

“Right,” Karkat says slowly. For all his research, he doesn’t think he’s retained any useful information. His fingers are buzzing and he feels so out of his element, staring at Dave’s hands absentmindedly moving the tiny ziplock bag around. It’s hypnotic.

Terezi moves her head back and forth, contemplating. “Alright. I buy it. What’s it do?”

Karkat answers before either of the others can. “It’s a club drug,” he says, too quietly. “It’s just ... you get hyper and want to dance, or whatever.”

Sollux snorts out his nose and Karkat looks at him past Dave’s head.

“Right?” he asks them, feeling—not for the first or last time that night—incredibly stupid. What is it about these two makes him feel so inferior? On one hand, he’s happy with his life; he thinks he’s smart and successful, without a doubt more than these two are. But on the other hand ... there’s something so weirdly, upsettingly, but undeniably _cool_ about these assholes. Sollux was never this confident and aloof in high school, and Dave ... Christ, he doesn’t know about Dave.

“Yeah,” Sollux laughs. “Something like that.”

“You’re up for it?” Dave asks, pointing his finger at Karkat and Terezi, wagging it back and forth. “You can still drink and stuff on it, no worries.”

Karkat makes sure he’s the first to say, “Yeah,” and hopes no one notices him wipe his sweaty palms on his jeans. If Dave does, he doesn’t say anything.

Sollux hoots and goes back to his game, the sounds of the TV filling the room. “Sweet. It’s lame to do alone.”

Karkat sees Terezi take another swig out of the corner of his eye. Is she nervous?

“‘Rezi? You in?” Dave asks, leaning over him to look at her. Karkat bristles at the sudden nickname. 

“Totally,” she breathes, either excited or masking her apprehension well. Karkat watches her and can’t tell.

Dave smiles again. He has small, crowded teeth. Not perfectly white. 

Like Sollux, he says, “Sweet.” He stands, yanking his jeans up when they fall around his butt. Whatever he’s wearing under them, they’re black. “I’ll get some stuff.”

Karkat watches him go, baffled. He shifts a little uncomfortably, not half drunk enough for his liking, and takes Terezi’s flask when she offers it. After he passes it back, he puts his hand on the arm of the couch for her to hold and she does. He likes how her painted claws look against his, and he runs the pad of his thumb over one.

“These are nice,” he says quietly. 

She smiles. Her lips are just as red.

“Thanks.” She looks at the giant TV across the coffee table and cocks her head. “What’s this?” she asks Sollux.

“GTA Five,” he replies without looking away from the screen. He’s driving some sports car through a rich looking neighbourhood. The graphics are incredible.

“Oh, I heard about this! It’s supposed to be amazing.”

“It’s pretty cool,” Sollux shrugs. “I mean, pretty revolutionary for this sort of thing. They really fucked up the multiplayer, though. I only play it when I’m drunk.” 

Karkat still smiles at his lisp. Whatever he is now, some things never change. 

“That doesn’t sound bad,” Terezi laughs.

“It’s not.” He crashes his car into a low wall, apparently intentionally, and his character goes flying out into a tennis court. “If you swim far enough out into the ocean, a shark eats you.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, it’s fucking terrifying. Here, I’ll go do it.” His character starts running through backyards.

A door slams behind him and Karkat looks over his shoulder. Dave’s coming back into the room with ... a roll of toilet paper? And three stacked shot glasses, and a bottle tucked under his arm. 

Terezi has slid off the armchair onto the floor. When she speaks, her voice sounds different, noticeably drunk. 

“What the fuck is _that_ for?” she asks, before Karkat can, laughing. 

“Parachuting,” he says simply, clambering over the back of the couch to slide back next to Karkat. He slips onto the floor between the coffee table and the couch, sitting cross legged like a little kid, and puts the stuff on the table. Terezi inspects the bottle he slams down—tequila. 

“Ooh, is this for us?”

Karkat doesn’t want to tell her she’s already drank too much, so he sits back. It’s not his place, he won’t be _that_ boyfriend.

“Ahh, ahh,” Dave pulls the bottle towards himself. “There’s only a bit left, we need it to take this.”

“What?” Karkat looks down at him. 

“Well, you can just use water, but it’s easier with alcohol ‘cause you like ... choke it back.” 

Karkat nods slowly. Dave either assumes he knows how to do this or chooses, for some reason, not to embarrass him in front of the others. He explains.

“You take a tiny bit of tissue—” He rips a piece off the roll. “—and you roll the molly up in it, and take it like a pill. Minimal nasty taste, more of a quick dissolve than caps.” He pauses. “I guess I didn’t need to bring the whole roll. Whatever.” He shakes his head.

Karkat laughs. 

“Oh, look, I’m swimming,” Sollux chirps, and Terezi perks up, excited.

“I wanna see the shark!” She’s definitely drunk.

From the floor, Dave bumps Karkat’s knee to get his attention.

“Are you super drunk?”

Karkat raises his eyebrows. “No,” he says, honestly. He’s eyeing the tequila nervously.

“Okay. You get more, then.” He looks at Terezi, who’s crawled around the front of the coffee table to watch the game. Sollux’s character is swimming out into the ocean and, frankly, it’s beautiful. And a little scary, like the real ocean. “Not to be a dick, but I’m gonna give her a little less.”

Karkat wrings his hands. He’s not in the habit of apologizing for her, but ...

“Okay. Cool. Yeah, I don’t know. She’s normally fine.”

Dave laughs. “Don’t worry, dude.” He looks up at him again. Karkat is starting to notice—every time he’s looking at Dave, Dave looks back at him. He didn’t get it at first, but now he’s pretty sure it’s so he can’t see him in profile. When his head is turned you can see more of his face, the curve of his cheekbone and maybe eyelashes before they disappear into the shadow of his inexplicable sunglasses. He looks at him head-on so they hide more of his face. 

“Chill, alright?” he says.

Karkat glares at him. “I’m _so_ fucking chill.”

“Yeah,” Dave says as he turns back to the little ziplock bag on the table. “You’re the pinnacle of chill. What with the mad hand-wringing and flipping out, classic cool.”

Karkat knees him in the back.

“Hey, watch it! This shit ain’t cheap.”

“Really?”

“Nah, it’s pretty cheap.” 

He lays the little scrap of paper on the table and knocks a bit of molly onto it. His movements are practiced and careful, surprisingly so. When he twists the tiny parcel of paper closed, there’s hardly any in there. Karkat isn’t sure what he was expecting. He didn’t weigh or measure it, how does he know if it’s too much? What if they overdose? God, Dave’s right. He’s so not chill.  He sits back and watches Sollux’s character get eaten by a gigantic shark. It makes him jump.  While the game reloads, Sollux leans forward and puts his arms on Dave’s head. 

“Christ D, are you making snow angels? I’m getting old over here.”

“Fuck right off,” he laughs, jerking his head up to knock his arms off. “I’d like to see you do this shit with your clumsy-ass sausage fingers.”

“Hey, these sausage fingers make _your_ beautiful music.”

“Blow me.”

Lined up in front of him on the table are four little white toilet-paper parcels, hardly larger than a finger nail. There’s a fine white skittering of powder on the table around them, and Dave licks his index finger and drags it around in it, then sticks it in his mouth. He rubs it on his gums and makes a face.

“Christ, that’s awful,” he laughs, rubbing his mouth. “Cool. Okay. We’re good?”

Karkat can feel his heart hammering in his ears, pushed apprehensively back against his head. 

Sollux starts pouring shots of tequila. “They’re not retarded.” He pushes two shots towards Terezi and Karkat with his fingertips. “Take it however you take pills. I take the shot and float it, _personally, '_ cause it’s light, it floats. Don’t choke on it."  


“You’re really not selling this to me,” Karkat grumbles, nervous now. Well, more nervous than before. He’s having visions of choking on this stupid ball of wet toilet paper, spewing tequila all over the table and wasting their MDMA. He slides off the couch and sits on the ground in front of the coffee table between Dave and Terezi.

Sollux clucks his tongue at him. “I don’t have to.” He plucks a little parcel off the table and raises his glass to Dave in the other hand, but Karkat can’t move. “Cheers.”

They clink shot glasses and drop the tiny paper parcels into their mouths. Eyes screwed shut, they both down the shot and swallow after a second. Dave starts coughing, half laughing. 

Karkat notices Terezi hasn’t moved either, staring down at her tequila and the tiny paper parcel next to it. 

“You ready?” he asks her, wiping his hands on his jeans again.

She scoffs at him like he doesn’t know she’s just as nervous as he is.  “It'll be fine!” 

She picks up her glass and the two of them clink them together, pinching the little package up in their claws. They don’t weigh anything. In one smooth enough movement, they each toss their shots back and drop them in.

It floats on the burning tequila and he feels the toilet paper start to dissolve, sticking to the roof of his mouth. He panics and swallows it as quickly as he can, but it’s started to disintegrate to the point that he can taste whatever it is at the back of his tongue, so shockingly bitter like nothing he’s ever tasted.  But then it’s over and he only coughs for a second, thumping his chest, more from the burn of the tequila than anything. He swallows a couple more times and swears he can feel the pulpiness of the paper in his throat.

He doesn’t feel any different besides the panicky blood rushing in his ears. 

“That wasn’t so bad,” he hears Terezi hum. “What about the rest of this tequila?”

Sollux laughs. “When did _you_ start drinking so much, ‘Rezi?”

“When did you start being my _mom_?”

He holds his hands up. “Alright, party girl. Give ‘er.” He nudges the bottle towards her and she drinks it straight.

Karkat looks over at Dave who, again, looks back at him.

“I don’t feel it.”

“It takes like ... what, a half hour? Something like that. Depends what you ate and stuff, I don’t know.” He looks up at Sollux, who’s checking his phone. “Can we play something else?” 

“Like what?” 

“I dunno, a multiplayer. We’ve got guests, gotta be good hosts or whatever.” 

“This ain’t your fuckin’ house.”

“You’re doing a bad job. We don’t even have any music on, Christ.” Dave hops up again, one hand holding onto his jeans. “Put something fun in, I’ll get some sick jams going.”

Sollux groans at having to get up, and Karkat laughs. Terezi’s fingers wind between his again and he sits dazed on the carpet, watching Sollux bow over a messy stack of PlayStation games. His giant t-shirt is dimensionlessly black and hides his skinny body like a garbage bag.  Dave comes back balancing a laptop and a bottle of rum.

“Is Mario Kart fun enough for you?” Sollux asks over his shoulder.

“No.” Dave climbs over the back of the couch again, bouncing the bottle of rum on the couch cushions. It almost smacks Karkat in the back of the head before he grabs it. “Let’s go balls out on this, we’re playing Halo.” 

“Oh, gross. Don’t do this to me, I’m terrible at Halo.”

“No, we’re doing this. Here,” he says, holding the laptop out to Karkat. “Take this, two secs.”

In a couple minutes they’re all set up, controllers in hand, stiff rum and Cokes mixed, some weirdly hypnotic electronic music pulsing into the room from Dave’s laptop on the coffee table. Terezi’s talking a mile a minute, but also absolutely destroying the three of them at Halo. He can feel her thigh flush against his under the table, Dave somewhere on his other side, and his hands feel funny but he chalks it up to the booze. He loses track of time, lost in the game and the intense, atmospheric music.

He can’t remember the last time he was so close to a human that wasn’t on a crowded bus. He can smell Dave, this warm, oily smell that’s so distinctly human and the sharp, sweet tang of his cologne, or something like it. All of it pressingly foreign to him.

It isn’t until he barks laughing as he snipes Terezi from across the map that he feels anything.

“My voice sounds weird,” he says suddenly, and both Dave and Sollux look at him. He puts his controller down. “It’s like ... louder than normal. Like it’s close inside my ears. What’s that?”

Dave is laughing at him, but not in a mean way. Sollux shakes his head. 

“That’s normal,” Dave assures him. “You want another drink?” 

“Sure,” he says slowly, obsessed with the sound of his own voice and its bizarre clarity. The game stays paused as Dave goes for another round and Karkat turns to Terezi. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she says, just as slowly and unsure. “I get what you mean about the voice thing, it’s ...” She laughs. “It’s so funny, it’s like ... you’re closer to your own voice than you’re supposed to be. You know?”

“Yeah.”

He laces their fingers and feels like he can feel each ridge of her fingerprint on his own.

“Oh my God.”

“I know.”

He breaks out in shivers. “Okay. This is okay.”

He’s sliding his fingers along hers, down to her palm and back to her claws when she says, “I don’t feel great.”

“What?”

“Seriously. I think I’m gonna ... go to the bathroom ...” She starts to stand on shaky legs. “Lux, where’s your bathroom?”

“First door down that hall,” he says quickly, a blur of black and gold as he rushes up to guide her. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Karkat is sitting alone on the floor trying not to panic but also obsessed with the scan lines he’s pretty sure he can see scrolling down the TV when Dave comes back juggling three full glasses in his hands. 

“Where’d they go?”

“Bathroom—is she okay? Will it make her sick? It’s not like, bad for you, right?”

He can’t tell if Dave looks concerned behind his shades. 

“No, no.” He puts the three drinks down on the table. “Well, yeah, it is, but it’s brain-bad, not overdose-and-die bad. I gave her a half dose, it’s not that.” He sinks into the couch, knee by Karkat’s shoulder. “I’m gonna venture a wild guess and say she’s just mad drunk.”

“Fuck.”

Sollux comes out of the bathroom grimacing.  “That was unpleasant.”

“Is she okay?” Karkat stands on his own wobbly legs, controller dropping out of his lap. “I’ll check on her.”

“Breathe through your mouth.”

Sure enough, Karkat ends up holding her hair back in the bathroom while she throws up, and pities her in both the troll and the human sense of the word. 

“Christ, you poor thing,” he murmurs, smoothing her hair off her forehead. “Not to be a dick or anything, but what were you thinking?”

“I was nervous,” she groans miserably, clutching the toilet seat. “I don’t know, we’ve never done this and I drank to be less nervous but then being so drunk just made me _more_ nervous, and Halo gave me the spins, and—” She throws up again and Karkat lurches back. 

“It’s fine, don’t worry.” He rubs her back and the feeling of her shirt under his palm sends shocks up his arm and he’s drawn into the rhythmic movement. He looks up at the lights lining the top of the bathroom mirror and they’re somehow unbearably bright, brighter than normal, and he knows it’s not the bulbs. “This stuff is crazy,” he says quietly, and Terezi just groans.

She ends up passing out with apologies, leaning against the bathtub, but she’s done throwing up. Karkat gets Sollux to carry her into the living room because he isn’t big enough to do it.

“I’ve never seen someone _so_ out for the count,” Sollux chuckles, laying her on the couch. “It wasn’t even like an hour.” Dave slides on the floor again to get out of her way and Karkat is surprised he doesn’t make some joke about putting her head in his lap. Karkat was thinking it. 

“Ah, she’ll be alright,” Dave says, waving his hand. Karkat comes back to sit next to him, pushing the coffee table farther away from the couch to give them more room. “How are _you_ doing?” Dave asks him.

“Fine. Good.” He looks at his hands. “It’s, uh—” He doesn’t know what to say, like the words are all coming at once in his head and he can’t pick one. “The lights in the bathroom look funny.” When he looks up, he squints. “The TV looks funny.”

He hears Dave laughing. “Did you look in the mirror? It dilates your pupils.” Karkat’s moving too slowly to think of backing away when Dave leans in. There’s that smell, the oiliness of hair and skin, rum and sour tequila on his breath. Karkat watches his own reflection in his shades. “Christ, you’re high. They’re like dimes,” he laughs. “Go look, it’s insane.” 

As Karkat stumbles slowly to his feet and down to the bathroom mirror, he hears Sollux grumble about Halo and the whirr of the PS4 stops as he changes the game. K arkat leans into his own reflection in the mirror and looks until he’s not sure how much time has passed, mesmerized by his own giant pupils. It’s bizarre—it’s still the face he’s used to looking at every day, but even such a small change like the size of his pupils is weirdly breathtaking right now.  At just over nine sweeps, the black pupils of his youth are beginning to turn the colour of his blood, but it’s taking time; they’re a dark garnet now, meaning he can still pass for a rust blood like he always has. He isn’t sure how bright they’re going to become as he gets older and he’s terrified to find out. By the time he’s ten sweeps, they could be his special shade of mutant cherry red. And right now they’re huge, too, and the colour is more obvious. He’s noticed Terezi’s eyes starting to change too, brightening to teal, but she’s excited about hers. 

He stumbles back into the living room. It feels like his body is propelled by some second motor, he’s fidgety and anxious. But it’s not bad. It’s kind of exciting. 

Terezi’s still lying curled up on the couch. Sollux has migrated to the armchair and is playing some other game (Karkat doesn’t know how he can concentrate enough for a game right now) and Dave is sitting on the floor at the coffee table in front of his laptop, which is still pumping music into the room. The screen lights up his glasses.  Karkat sits gingerly next to him. He still has half a glass of rum and coke left but he doesn’t want to drink it until he’s sure of whatever’s going to happen to him, it’s making him nervous. He can feel it in his hands and his brain, everything going sharp and clear and fast. He notices himself squirming and makes a concerted effort to stop.

“Karkat, right?” 

Dave’s voice sounds far away. He turns to look at him and for a second sees his face in profile. There’s part of an eyebrow, his cheek. Almost an eye. But then he moves.

“What?”

“Just making sure I got it right. We didn’t really talk the other night.” 

He’s talking fast and Karkat watches him. He’s rubbing his fingers together, stretching his legs out under the table only to tuck them back up again.

“Are you high?” His own voice sounds so, so strange to him.

Dave laughs breathlessly, looking down at his laptop. “Kind of. Are you?”

“I think so.”

Dave just laughs again. He cracks his neck. It’s an awkward silence, but it’s sort of not. Karkat knows he should say something, but doesn’t know what. It feels different between them now, maybe more vulnerable? But that’s not it. He’s less guarded. Or Dave is.

“What time is it?” He asks, peering at Dave’s screen. It’s just a music player, bright coloured album covers tiled across the screen.

“Barely eleven. We’ve got time. The Scratch is pretty close to here and fuck if I’m gonna be early to my own show.”

Oh, right. On some level, Karkat forgot Dave was a rapper. It was just ‘this asshole’ and ‘the guy who’s into Terezi,’ and forgot how they met in the first place. There’s such a disconnect between the surprisingly small, fidgeting _boy_  sitting next to him and the _man_  that yelled and rapped at a sea of drunk Alternian girls begging for him.

Speaking of which. Before he can think better of it, half spurred on by a need to say _anything_ and half by the weird feeling in his stomach that’s begging him to talk, Karkat asks, “Was that girl your girlfriend?”

"Which one?” He’s not looking at him, but the shadow cast from the light of the screen stops Karkat from seeing much of his face. It glints off his black nose ring.

“Backstage last time, with the Aries horns and the long hair.”

Finished his own drink, Dave reaches over for Karkat’s. “Oh, Aradia. Nah, nothing like that.”

He feels stupid for asking. God, he wishes Terezi was up. He doesn’t know what’s making him so chatty, but before Dave can say anything else, he asks, “How were there so many Alternian girls at your show? The one I was at. I know it was an Alternian club so of course they were there, but those places don’t normally book humans anyways, do they, so it’s like—”

Dave starts shushing him, holding his hands up and laughing. 

“Fuck, you are _so_ high, calm down.”

“Am I?”

Dave seems to look at him, but it’s hard to tell where his eyes go, even from so close. He’s smiling crookedly. “You’ve really never done molly before?”

“No.”

“No shit. Well, you either gotta move, like dancing, and if you’re not dancing you gotta talk. You’re gonna talk your fucking head off, you’re everyone’s best friend on M. Real heart to hearts.”

“Oh my _God_.” 

“No, it’s cool! You’ll love it. Fuck.” He runs his hands back through his hair and it flops right back to where it was, in some no-mans land between long and short. “I’m getting more drinks. Come with me.”

“What?”

“Come see the kitchen, I haven’t given you a tour.”

“Still not your house!” Sollux, silent until now, calls out from the armchair as the two of them struggle to their feet. 

“Whatever. C’mon.”

Karkat picks up his glass and follows Dave into the other room, a dimly-lit, yellow-tiled kitchen with a dripping faucet and laminate countertops covered in crumbs.

“Ew.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“My place is fucking _lightyears_ nicer than this, Jesus Christ,” Karkat grumbles. It’s not _that_ bad,but it’s below ground and it feels like a bunker. There’s one small window up by the ceiling over the sink.

Dave is ducked into the fridge. “Where do you live?”

“Chinatown—don’t change the subject. What’s your deal?”

Dave comes out of the fridge with a two-litre of Coke. “My deal with what?”

“The Alternian girls at your show.” Karkat watches him mix more drinks, the rest of a 2-6 of rum dumped into two glasses of Coke. 

“What’s it look like?”

His answer comes out before he can think to be more diplomatic about it. “Like you’re some gross-ass fetishist.”

Dave turns around slowly, setting the rum bottle down with a glassy clunk. “That’s what you think?”

“Correct me, then.”

Dave clucks his tongue and holds Karkat’s drink out towards him, leaning back on the counter. Karkat hovers by the table across from him, gingerly taking it. He can smell the rum in it well before he drinks it, it’s so strong. He can feel his eyes bouncing from Dave’s face to his hands, holding his giant glass, eyes moving around the kitchen like they can’t keep still.

“I can’t help it if they like me. I like beautiful girls. Alternians are beautiful.”

Karkat notes his use of _Alternian_. 

“So it’s just a _preference_ , you’re saying?” Karkat sneers.

“Sure.”

“Do you date humans, too?”

“I have.”

“Often?”

“No.”

“So that’s not a preference. It’s a ... like, a specific fixation. A requirement. Exoticism.” Karkat’s staring at his drink, feeling the carbonation from the pop bursting tiny bubbles against his chin like pinpricks. Frustration and anger bubbling inside him.

“Do _you_ date humans?” Dave asks, crossing his ankles. 

“I haven’t, no.”

“So you only like your _own_ species. Maybe that’s just as bad." He grins.

Karkat knows it’s just a dumb joke, and he doesn’t mean to, but he flares up instantly. “Maybe responding to _years_ of systematic oppression and—I don’t know— _biology_ , is different than wanting to _bang alien chicks_ , you fucking prick!”

“Hey! Fuck.” Dave puts his drink down. “It’s not like that, Jesus. I don’t _make_ them come to my shows, it’s not like I’m constantly cruising for troll poon. I’ve had legit girlfriends, I’m not just being a dick about it.”

Karkat doesn’t know what to say. He’s staring at Dave’s socked feet on the cracked tile, trying to figure out why he’s so angry. His eyes won’t stay still.  He hears Dave slurp his drink.

“You don’t even _like_ humans much, do you? _Systematic oppression_ , you said.”

“Nevermind."

“No, it’s fine. I get it. It’s rough for you guys, I’d never say it isn’t.”

Karkat looks up and drinks to quell a weird nervousness rising in his chest. 

Dave tips his head. “You’re a rust blood?” 

Now his heart is beating too hard and fast, he can feel it in his face. His lips are buzzing and, to make things worse, he can feel his ears go red, as if answering Dave’s question. 

“Yeah,” he lies.

Dave, surprisingly, laughs. 

“You must be _really_ old fashioned if you’re embarrassed by that.”

“I’m not.” 

“You’re pretty ‘looking bashfully at the ground’ for not being embarrassed. C’mon, lighten up. I’m making conversation.” When Karkat doesn’t say anything else, he adds, “I can see it in your eyes, starting to colour or whatever. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.” He’s used to saying years and not sweeps, like most people do. It’s not worth the conversion. “You?”

With his own eyes hidden, Dave is an entirely indeterminate age somewhere between sixteen and twenty-six, small but not _that_ small, and skinny without it being in that soft preteen way. He’s all angles and there are bluish veins running like highways through his forearms. 

“Just turned twenty.” 

Karkat hadn’t thought he’d be the older one, not that a year is really anything at all. He laughs quietly. “Funny.”

They’re quiet for a second before Dave huffs. “Christ, this is somber for a house full of guys on drugs. We’ve gotta go, finish your drink. How’re you feeling?”

“Good. Fine. Um, shaky. Is that normal?” 

“Totally. Let’s go.”

He leaves the kitchen and Karkat follows, downing the rest of his drink. “I thought you wanted to be fashionably late.”

“Yo, are you _teasing_ me? Look at you, coming out of your shell.”

“Fuck off.”

“Lux, let’s go!” Dave barks, and Sollux jumps. 

“Jesus, you’re peppy.”

“Cause this is gonna be a great show. The best show we’ve ever, ever done. Ceiling-crumbling, panty-dropping perfect. You feeling it?”

“I’m always feeling it,” Sollux deadpans, and Dave roars laughing.

“Wait,” Karkat stops, peering over the back of the couch. “What about Terezi?”

“She can stay here,” Sollux shrugs. “Send her a text for if she wakes up, we’ll lock up.” 

He worries the glass in his hands. “I feel bad leaving her.”

“So, what, you spend the night on Lux’s couch watching her be passed out? Naw.” Dave goes around the couch to look at her. “She’s fine, she’s on her side. It’s not like you could carry her home, anyways.”

“No—I don’t know. She’ll wake up and know I just left, I’d feel so shitty.”

Sollux shuts his game off. “ _She’d_ leave _you_.”

They’re all silent for a second.

Karkat doesn’t want to admit it, but Sollux is probably right. Not that Terezi doesn’t love him, but it’s not about that. She likes to have fun, and if she were in his position, it wouldn’t make sense to ruin her night just to watch over him. He wouldn’t want her to, anyways, and he assumes the same goes for her. If he knew she ruined _her_ night because he passed out, he’d feel awful. It only makes sense.

“She’ll be safe?” he asks.

“Yeah, man. Leave a note, no big. She’ll understand.” 

“Okay. Yeah, it’ll be fine.”

Dave leaves while Karkat scribbles a note and comes back into the room in a grey sweater, his hair all messed up. He pulls a toque on and tosses the tiny bag of molly to Sollux, who fumbles it. Karkat laughs. 

“You hold onto that, I’ll just fucking drop it.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” He slings a laptop bag over his shoulder and hangs a giant pair of black headphones around his neck. 

“Please don't bring that up.” Dave turns to Karkat. His sweater hides his skinny arms and his toque makes him look taller so already he’s somehow more imposing, morphing into the guy he is on stage. Karkat looks at his own reflection in his shades—a black t-shirt he thought he’d grow into someday and worn grey jeans—and he doesn’t feel as out of place as he did earlier. He’s giddy, which is a foreign feeling to him. He’s not used to being excited for anything other than the end of exams. “You ready to go to the best show of your life?”

Karkat says, "No, I already said I’d go to yours,” and Dave punches him in the arm.

 

The night is dark, clear and cold as they huddle down the street, Sollux towering almost a foot over Dave and Karkat. Dave’s coat is swishing against Karkat’s arm as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of smokes.

“Want one?” he asks, half joking, but Karkat accepts. He’s had maybe two cigarettes in his whole life, what with being an oncology student, but fuck if he’s going to look like a loser in front of Dave. Dave pulls two out and lights Karkat’s before his own. He manages to smoke it without coughing but doesn’t know how to hold it in a cool way and fiddles with it a lot while they’re waiting for the bus.

“I can’t believe you take the bus to your own shows,” Karkat laughs. “You’re the least hard rapper ever.”

“How do you know my Escalade isn’t just in the shop?”

“Your shirt has holes in it.”

Dave elbows him again, and Sollux for laughing.

“Rap isn’t about _money_ ,” Dave stresses. “It’s, you know. The message. And the music. And being cool. I could have a car if I wanted—who drives in this city anyways?”

“Terezi has a scooter.” Karkat blows smoke at his feet, looking from his shoes to Dave’s and Sollux’s. Dave’s were the dirty white high tops by the front door, Sollux’s neon bright and immaculate.

Sollux chuckles. “Like a Vespa? I bet you two look _adorable_ riding around town on that thing. Is there a basket on the front? You ride on the back, don’t you?”

“Hey, get fucked! It’s cool. She loves it.”

“I think I’m coming down,” Dave interrupts. “When’s the bus supposed to get here?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Do we have time for a bump?”

“Always.” Sollux fishes the bag out of his pocket, and his keys. As Karkat watches, he squishes the bag open and uses one of his keys as a tiny scoop, lifting more of the powder out. He snorts it off the end of the key and coughs a little.  “God, that doesn’t really get any easier.”

“Amateur. Give it.” Dave does the same thing, but much more smoothly. Sollux sneers at him. He passes the bag and keys to Karkat, who holds them so delicately and nervously like they’re going to explode. “Don’t sniff too hard,” Dave warns. “It burns like hell and won’t work right.”

“Alright.” He tries to sound like he knows what he’s doing. He takes too much the first time and knocks some back into the bag, and when he raises the key to his nose and sniffs it’s _awful_. It burns through his whole face and makes his eyes water, and through the blood rushing in his ears he hears Sollux and Dave laughing at him. He shoves the keys and bag back into Sollux’s hands. The smell of MDMA stays in his nose, an almost inexplicable smell. Like chemicals, bleach, and something old and false. 

“Jesus Christ, that’s _rough_ ,” he coughs.

“It gets easier. I’m going to assume you’ve never snorted anything.”

“Fuck no.” 

Dave is still laughing. “Be careful, it’ll hit you way quicker now.” He turns to Sollux. “God, this is hilarious. It’s like watching a kid take their training wheels off for the first time, and they’re so stoked but they totally just eat shit every time.”

“Like watching a puppy run into a screen door.”

“Alright, alright, fuck both of you,” Karkat grumbles. Smoking is giving him a head rush and he can already feel his heart beating faster and mouth going dry from the drugs. It feels like his chest is going to explode, but it's somehow in a good way. 

The bus comes around the corner and he jumps, startled, and Sollux laughs at him and then they’re all laughing, giggling like little girls, and Dave pushes him onto the bus ahead of him. 

“This is going to be so—much—fun.”

 

Everything’s going bright and fast and rushing together by the time they get off the bus a block from The Scratch, right downtown, and the streets are crowded on a Friday night. Somehow he’s linked arms with Dave who has linked arms with Sollux, like kids lost on a school field trip, and they’re pushing through crowds to get past the queue. 

“Are all these people here for you?” Karkat asks, voice sounding loud and sharp in his ears again.

“Probably not,” Dave admits. “This place has like, multiple rooms? It’s like a bunch of clubs stacked.”

“We’re good, but we’re not _that_ good,” Sollux chuckles, leading the way through the throng of waiting club goers like parting the Red Sea. 

Karkat can see people looking at them. Do they actually recognize Dave as LOHAC? Is he that big of a name? Some of them _must_ be here just to see him. The thought of this is absolutely baffling.

They go up to a bouncer that smiles and slaps Dave on the back and lets them past the rope without waiting or showing their ID, and the club is already hot and crowded and smells like women and booze. They skirt around the outside of a large, concrete room and it’s all Karkat can do to take it all in. He’s never been here. This time there’s almost an even split of Alternian girls and humans, and more men than at the last show, mostly Alternian. 

“Are you nervous?” Karkat shouts over the music. There’s no one on the darkened stage yet, but it’s playing from somewhere. He realizes they’re still linking arms and drops his. 

“Yes,” Dave shouts back without looking. “No. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.” 

They get to a small passageway next to the stage and then it’s quieter as they go down a bright hallway to the back. The lights are glowing this unimaginable white. People are leaning on the walls, drinking and kissing and laughing, and some look at them as they go by. 

Dave continues, talking fast. “It’s like, I know I’m really good at it, and it’ll go well and be awesome, and I love it when I’m up there, but the couple minutes before are _hell_. The anticipation. I sweat like a motherfucker.”

Sollux hears him and says, “Wuss.”

“Coming from the guy who gets to hide in the back behind his Macbook, _I’m_ the pussy,” Dave gripes. Sollux just laughs at him. “You’d be sweating like a bitch if you had to essentially _yell_ at a hundred people at once. You gotta think about what to do with your arms and legs, how to move, and _remember lyrics_. It’s fucking nerve-wracking.” He pauses. “Not that producing isn’t. I know what you do.”

“ _Thank_ you.”

They follow Sollux into a small room with a couch, a table, and a bunch of equipment. There’s a keyboard with a bunch of knobs and screens and buttons and heaps of cords.

A girl with her hair all piled up on top sticks her head into the room and Karkat jumps again. 

“LOHAC?” she says, before she sees Dave.

“Yo.”

“You’re on in five, they’re getting _rowdy_ out there,” she grins. “Nice to see you guys back.”

“Likewise.”

She shuts the door behind her when she leaves. Dave takes his toque off and rubs his hair.

“Fuck, I’m too high for this.”

“Really?” 

“No. I’m gonna make an ass of myself though, and you get a front row seat,” he laughs.

Karkat hadn’t thought about where _he_ was going to be for all this. The thought of standing completely alone in a packed club is horrifying—but it isn’t as horrifying as it would have been if he were _just_ drunk. Something about this stuff makes him so oddly _confident_ , something he never gets from drinking alone. He remembers his blown pupils and feels cute and sweaty and invincible. 

“Oh. Right, so, do I—” and he points at the door.

“No, no, you can chill with Sollux at the back of the stage. Lotsa people do.” 

“Right,” Karkat says again, and he can’t stop smiling, staring down at his shoes. “This is fun,” he admits, quietly. “I’m excited.”

Dave steps over to where Karkat is leaning against the couch and shoves him playfully, like a rough housing teen boy. “Gettin’ all emotional over here, Jesus. This stuff does crazy shit to you.” Then Dave gives him a weird sort of half-hug, squeezing an arm around his shoulders for a second. He can smell his deodorant and his hair, feel the beat of his heart against his arm. He stiffens. Then Dave’s gone again, smushing his face against Sollux’s shoulder as he starts to gather his stuff from the table.

“I’m so excited, Lux,” he says. “This is going to be so good. We’re gonna do _so_ good. These are going to be the sickest beats these plebs have ever seen.”

“We’re the best.” 

“Aren’t we? We’re so fucking good. This is amazing.”

_“I’m_ the one being emotional?” Karkat laughs. “You’re gonna be late if you don’t get out there.”

“Right!” Dave barks, straightening abruptly. There’s a drunken flush across his cheekbones, what isn’t hidden by his sunglasses. “Right, let’s fucking _do_ this! Let’s tear this place down.” He snaps his fingers at Karkat. “You’re about to see some _magic.”_

 

On stage, it’s so loud Karkat can’t hear himself think. The house music is pumping out the speakers while Sollux sets up in the shadowy back of the stage, and the sound of people yelling and talking and laughing mixes into this dull, inescapable roar. Dave is hovering back stage, psyching himself up. Karkat is leaning on Sollux’s mixing board, watching him boot his laptop up.

“I don’t know how any of this stuff works,” he yells, conversationally. He feels stupid not talking. “It’s super impressive. All these dials and shit, I don’t get any of it.” 

“Most people don’t. It’s a steep learning curve, but once you can do it, it’s so insanely fun. You can do _anything_.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It’s beyond nice.”

 

By the time Sollux is set up the crowd is pressing against the front of the stage, hollering impatiently, and it’s time. The house music dies down and there’s a silent, pregnant pause before Sollux starts to play something.  It’s one long, high note, like a UFO, warbling. Karkat watches him with sweating palms, staring at his fingers on the lit-up synth. He doesn’t know why _he’s_ nervous, he doesn’t have to do anything. The room is pulsing with agitated energy and people are quieting down in anticipation. 

Then, it starts. Each key on the keyboard is a different sound and he puts them together into this bizarre, rhythmic beat so loud Karkat can feel it in his face. People are cheering and stomping and dancing before Dave even comes on.

The lights come up. Karkat feels Dave brush by him before he sees him, and then he’s out on stage, the beat changes, and he’s rapping into a cordless mic.

_“This shit looks like 54, sweat still drippin’ off the bedroom walls, I’m in a crowded room paralyzed by the sound of the boom, n’ coke lines on the bathroom floor—”_

A shiver jolts down Karkat’s spine as he watches him from the back of the stage, crowd lost in the lights. The beat is so loud he can’t hear if they’re cheering.

_“Cause you look like a hologram—on the rise, I don’t understand, ‘cause when I reach out to hold your hand you slip through like a grain of sand—”_

His voice has that same loud confidence it did last time and it’s startling. Like last time, girls at the front reach for him. 

_“Surfin’ through this masquerade I’m still tryin’ to find you—do you even exist?”_

It’s weirdly hypnotizing, watching him, listening. Sollux has his headphones over one ear, moving methodically and quickly to the music he’s creating.

_“And to my surprise, you were there right in front of my eyes—let’s flee from this disguise—and ride, alright?”_

The beat is loud and aggressive and sounds like people banging things together, but there’s something so harmonizing about it. Itgoes with the two of them perfectly.

_“C’mon and let’s die young—come on and let’s die young—”_

Karkat is sweating, at the very least tapping his foot, hidden behind Sollux’s set up. Dave was right—this stuff makes you want to _move_. He can’t dance, he’s never been able to and certainly not without Terezi, but Dave is _good_. There’s something so catchy about all this. Karkat hadn’t wanted to admit it, but he _is_ talented.

_“Come on and let’s die young—come on and let’s die young—”_

When he’s done the first track Sollux drops the music down and the crowd goes nuts. 

Dave laughs breathlessly into the mic and it’s so loud. 

“Can I get a beer up here? Yes?” He looks offstage, pointing from himself towards the bar. Impressively, in a handful of seconds, there’s a full bottle of beer being handed to him from the crowd. “Wow, I did _not_ think that was going to work, you guys are the best.”

They laugh as he drinks and sets the bottle down next to him on the stage. “I bet you a _million_ dollars I kick that over at some point tonight."

“Alright, I’m—” He laughs like he can’t help himself. “—I’m real fucked up tonight, folks, so we’re gonna take a break from these sick raps to hear somethin’ special, one sec.”

Everyone cheers and hollers, and he flicks the mic off, spins on his heel and comes back to Sollux and Karkat. He’s shining with sweat.

The first thing he says is, “I am really fucking high and emotional right now,” and Karkat laughs until he can’t breathe. “How’d I do?”

“Perfect, that was fucking sick,” Sollux says, bent over his laptop. He puts something on while they talk so people have something to dance to. “But what are you doing?” 

“Play _Stranger_ ,” Dave asks.

“What?”

“You know, the one that goes—dah nah nah NAH nah nah naaaaah nahhh.”

“You’re joking.”

“It’s so sick! Let’s do it.” He takes his toque off to ruffle his hair and looks at Karkat. “How’s it going?” he asks breathlessly.

“Great. Fine. Perfect. That was good. I can’t believe you can just _do_ that.” He goes red.

Dave grins and it looks somehow, with his hair sticking to his forehead with sweat and his cheeks red, more genuine than normal. 

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.” He pulls his toque on and starts backing up towards the front of the stage again. “Lux! You better do it!”

“It’s your funeral.”

Back at the front of the stage, he turns the mic back on and stoops to pick his beer up. The glassy sound of the bottle hitting the mic rings through the club.

Sollux starts playing something and Karkat leans over. “What’s _Stranger?”_

He snorts. “This stupid cheesy electro-pop track he wrote. He’s never done it in public before, it’s cause he’s high.”

“No fuckin' way.”

“Yeah way, listen.”

He hovers over his laptop again, then back to the synth. He changes some settings.  Dave laughs again into the mic. 

“I’m super stoked to be here tonight,” he says, “so thank you for coming. I’m also very emotional and sweaty tonight, I’m sure you can imagine why.” The crowd hoots, so they apparently do. “Wait a sec.”

He puts the mic and his beer down on the stage and pulls his sweater over his head, grabbing at the back of his neck. It pulls his t-shirt up and his pale, skinny back glows in the lights. He might have been imagining it—his pupils are giant and the light is reflecting off everything—but Karkat sees something that looks like a tattoo on the back of his ribs. 

He tosses his sweater in the direction of the DJ booth and picks the mic back up, yanking his shirt down. 

“Much better. Okay, we’re gonna take a break from these sick beats for a second, so I hope you like cute electro-pop and seeing me embarrass the shit out of myself.”

Cheers, mostly girls, erupt from the crowd. There’s one girl at the front Karkat keeps watching, one in a group of Alternian girls who haven’t taken their eyes off Dave the whole time. There are a lot of girls at the front who look like they’re having religious experiences. Somewhere, in a deep spot in himself he wouldn’t admit to having, Karkat is proud of himself. There are girls who would’ve killed to hang out with Dave like he did tonight.  The music gets louder and Dave looks like he’s going to start, but turns around and looks at Sollux, raising a hand to shield his eyes in the light. 

“Fuck with my voice please, I don’t want anyone to hear me sing,” he says into the mic, and there’s laughter. Even he laughs. “Oh my God. Okay, let’s go.”

He takes one more swig of beer and the music starts up in earnest, a somewhat pretty, soft, fuzzy beat leagues different from the normal loud, almost offensive music Sollux normally plays.

And the echo is turned up and somehow tuned, but it’s still definitely Dave when he starts to sing. Not rap, but _sing_.

_“Never get sick of falling in and out of love, with a stranger on the other end of a string, smiling in a picture glowing on a screen—she don’t know I’m on the line and listening.”_

All of a sudden, the music stutters and drops, getting louder and deeper with a low, buzzing baseline, and Dave sings louder. People start dancing.

_“Everywhere you go, I’ll follow you—everyone you know, I know them too—everywhere you go, I’ll follow you, I’ll follow you—I wanna love you in real life.”_

Karkat gets goosebumps.

_“I wanna love you in real life—I wanna love you in real life—”_

He leans into Sollux. 

“This is weirdly beautiful,” he yells, not taking his eyes off Dave. He’s not moving as much as he does when he raps, standing almost reverently at the front of the stage. Karkat’s churning with a wonderful nervous energy, rubbing the fingers of one hand together, still tasting cigarettes and rum acutely on his tongue.

“Eh, he’s not my type,” Sollux shouts back, inclining his head towards Karkat.

_“What?_ No, I said—”

“Hey, no, it’s cool, everyone experiments at some point in their life.”

“I’m not _experimenting_!” Karkat bristles. That’s not at _all_ what he meant, he meant the music and yeah, maybe the singing, but not Dave _himself_.

“Yo, do what you want! Don’t let my wild disapproval stop you.”

“You—what?”

Sollux doesn’t say anything back for a bit.

Dave sings. _“I’m memorizing every pixel of your skin, and every single one’s another scene that begins with when I meet you on the other end of a dream—you don’t know me but I know you’ll let me in.”_

“Don’t get me wrong,” Sollux says, as quietly as he can manage, which is still yelling. “He’s like my best friend, and a cute little dude, I guess, but...he’s not like you, man. He’ll chew you up and spit you out.”

_“I wanna love you in real life—I wanna love you in real life—”_

His voice is softer than when he raps, obviously. And higher. He sounds his age. The music is so loud you can hardly hear him but it’s there, and it’s lovely.

“I’m not into him,” Karkat shouts, and would have shoved him if he weren’t playing, and if he weren’t a foot taller than him. “I have a girlfriend.”

Sollux just shrugs at him and Karkat knows his silence is strategic.

_“I wanna love you in real life—I wanna love you in real life—”_

The song ends and Dave laughs into the mic again. He pulls his toque off and runs his hand through his hair, glowing under the lights.

He laughs, “I’m fucking _adorable_ ,” and girls burst into laughter and cheers again. Sollux keeps a quiet, steady beat going in between songs when he talks. “Some cute-ass pop music for you, you’re welcome.” He bends down to pick his beer up and stumbles a little, laughing to himself. He drinks and straightens back up. “And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.”

Sollux starts a new track.  Dave does two or more songs, moving and waving his bare, skinny arms at the crowd. Like last time, a few gregarious girls in the front row reach and grab up at him and he touches their hands, grinning like a wolf.  It’s all deafeningly loud and Karkat’s ears start to ring, but he goes down to the bar and gets the stiffest drink imaginable, then feels better having something to hold in his hands. When he’s down at the bar he looks up at Dave, wanting to see him from the front again. He thinks he’s imagining the way he seems to be looking at him—but then again, those shades could help him see through the stage lights.

 _I’m not into him_ , Karkat confirms. Or reminds himself. _Fucking Sollux._ He sucks his drink hard through his straw and his head spins. He can feel himself coming down, the shaking in his fingers subsiding, his heart slowing its frantic beat. _I’m not_.  Dave is skinny and cocky and borderline rude. He’s a womanizer, a fetishizer, and a _human male_ , infinitely more trouble than they’re worth. He’s not in school and he’s reckless and young. Super young.

_He’ll chew you up and spit you out,_ Sollux had said. What had that meant?

Karkat goes back up to waver with his drink next to Sollux as they do their last track. The room has gotten unbearably hot and with the MDMA subsiding, he’s a bone-weary kind of exhausted. It must be so late, he thinks. He checks his phone and it's well past two.

When Dave is done he talks at the crowd through the mic, bows theatrically, and wanders off towards Karkat and Sollux with a giant, beaming grin.

“Am I good or am I good?” he says, wiping his face with his sweater.

“You fucking killed.” Sollux and him bump fists, grinning at each other. 

Dave looks at Karkat questioningly. “Hey? Not bad?”

“Good,” Karkat admits grudgingly. He notices Dave’s one empty beer still on the stage and holds his own drink out. “Want some?”

“I’m gonna finish this if you let me have it.”

“Go ahead.” 

Dave takes it, picks the straw out, and gulps what’s left of it down. Karkat chuckles. 

He gasps when he’s done and puts the glass on the synth. “Lux, you’re okay to take down? I’m going for a smoke.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sollux says, waving his hand. “Get out of here.”

Dave wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You coming?” he asks Karkat.

The words feel thick and funny on his tongue. “Sure.”

 

It’s unbearably cold out after the heat of the club and the sweat cooling on their skin. They lean against the wall of the club on the street-facing sidewalk and smoke and Karkat is careful not to look at him, staring down at the cigarette in his fingers. 

“There are so many ways to hold these,” he says, just to talk. “Like, you hold it like this and it looks like a joint, you hold it like _this_ and you look like you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. There are a lot of variables.”

“Yeah,” Dave says quietly, dreamily. With his head leaned back against the wall, he looks over at Karkat. “I was okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Was I great?”

“Sure.” He blows smoke up and into the night. “Do you write all that stuff?”

“I try. We collaborate on the beats, but the words are all mine.” He pauses. “You don’t listen to much rap, do you?”

“If by _much_ you mean _absolutely no_ ,” Karkat snorts. “I don’t know, it’s not that I don’t like it. I just wouldn’t know where to start.”

Dave says, “I’m a good start,” and Karkat laughs. “Seriously though, I can give you some names. Burn you a mixtape like it’s 1995.”

“Alright.” 

They’re quiet for a while longer. Karkat looks up and down the street and it’s late but there are still people huddling home from clubs and bars, smoking and talking in clumps, clumsily hailing taxis.

“What was that one song about?” Karkat asks, finally looking at him. Between the dark and the shades, he can hardly see his face. His hair is crusty with sweat. “The pop song.”

He laughs, then coughs.  “Did you like it?”

Karkat is too tired to lie. “Yeah.”

Dave shrugs and simply says, “Internet girlfriends. Ancient history,” offering no further explanation. “Glad you liked it. I can’t believe I did that."

“You were funny.” 

Dave smiles a particular smile and it catches him off guard. It’s one of the genuine smiles.

“Sweet. That’s good, I’m glad it works. Man, like ... I know I’m little guy, but when I’m up there?” He sighs and takes one last drag on his smoke before tossing the butt into the gutter like a dart. “I feel ten feet tall.” 

Karkat closes his eyes. His throat hurts from smoking and he can feel the tremors back in his fingers, but he smiles. He tucks his hands into his pockets.

“Cool.”

 


	3. 410–3326 w 27th ave

They go back inside to help Sollux pack up, and since the club is still open they stay and have a few drinks. Some girls come up to talk to Dave and, by association, Karkat, but he’s never felt so strange in his life now that the MDMA is subsiding, and he shrinks away into his own head. He can feel Dave next to him, too close, the inside of his arm against his back and resting on the bar, but it doesn’t feel so close through his sweater and he’s not even talking to him, anyways.

Karkat tries to make the weird sinking feeling of coming down go away by drinking, ordering rye and gingers until he has no idea what time it is anymore, and he doesn’t remember going to the bathroom but then he’s throwing up on the floor of a handicap stall. He loses Dave and Sollux for an indeterminate amount of time after that, somewhere in his swampy mind grateful they aren’t seeing him puke.

He knows there are lights and a hand on his arm, and the slap of cold air when they’re outside. A pale hand hailing a cab. Unfamiliar smells, someone’s sneaker up against his. Then all of a sudden it’s dark, and he doesn’t know anything anymore.

 

 

He wakes up with the sun, and the first thing he notices is the sick taste in his mouth and how badly his jaw is aching. His teeth feel like they’re going to fall out. He feels himself spinning and keeps his eyes screwed shut to stop it; he moves his legs and feels a tangle of sheets. The bed he’s in is softer than his own and he rolls towards something firm and warm, the middle of the mattress sagging inwards under weight. More unfamiliar smells. A cleaver down the middle of his skull. He opens his eyes.

He’s looking into a mop of grey-blond hair.

He tries to scoot backwards on the bed but the sagging of the old mattress under their combined weight has him sloughing back towards Dave. He doesn’t expect to feel so relieved to be fully clothed.

Dave’s still asleep, lying on his side facing away from Karkat in the same t-shirt and jeans he was wearing last night, all sweat and cologne. Karkat looks around as much as he can without jostling the bed—they’re in _someone’s_ bedroom, not Karkat’s. Dave’s? Or Sollux’s? He can’t see Sollux. It’s a tiny white room with a big black desk in one corner and laundry everywhere. The bed is a twin. There’s an outdated nightstand next to it with an ugly lamp on it, and—

Dave’s glasses.

His eyes widen. They’re definitely Dave’s sunglasses, slightly mirrored and impossibly dark, folded neatly next to a watch and a crumpled pile of receipts.

_He’s not wearing them_. He’s never seen Dave without them, and even trying to picture it is bizarre. But here he is, right next to him— _way_ too close to him—totally bare-faced. If he could lean over him without waking him up, he could see him, and God, he wants to, because those stupid shades take up so much of his face that he hardly knows what he looks like. Just his nose and the occasional white-blonde eyebrow. And his cheekbones. And his mouth.

Dave’s almost turned over on his stomach, but his face isn’t buried. Karkat has never felt so weak and hung over in his life, his body shaking with every heartbeat, but he slowly eases himself up on an elbow. He holds his breath. He starts to lean closer to Dave, peering over his shoulder, but can’t see enough without pressing against his back.

The second he does, Dave groans and stirs.

And as if it’s a _reflex_ , his hand comes up and covers his eyes. 

Karkat rolls onto his back as smoothly as he can manage, hoping Dave’s still asleep, but he’s not. He cracks his back and breathes the heavy, slow breaths of first waking up, then reaches for his shades on the nightstand and slips them on.

Karkat screws his eyes shut. Dave rolls over onto his back.

“You alright?” 

“Yeah,” he croaks, surprised by how hoarse his voice comes out. “No,” he corrects. “I feel like fucking trash.”

He expects Dave to laugh, but he doesn’t.

“Same,” he says quietly instead, staring up at the ceiling.

He doesn’t say anything else and a strange, unstoppable anxiety wells up in Karkat, something so unsettling and implacable. Something between regret and fear and wanting to go back in time and wanting time to stop because he doesn’t want to have to deal with any of whatever comes next—but why? He didn’t do anything wrong last night. Nothing happened, besides getting too drunk, and that strange closeness and feeling of wanting to pour his guts out and watching Dave sweaty and crooning to a sea of people. But nothing _happened_ happened, he shouldn’t be ashamed, and yet he’s never felt so anxious and melancholy in his life.

“You’ve, uh—” Dave stops and works his jaw back and forth. “You’ve never had to come down from something before, have you.” It’s not a question.

“I’ve had hangovers.”

“It’s not like that.”

“What do you mean?”

Dave rolls over onto his side to face Karkat, his arm still under his head. No longer afraid of jostling the bed, Karkat squirms away and presses his back to the wall so there’s space between them.

“Are you sad right now?”

“What?”

“Do you feel weird and kind of depressed?”

He doesn’t know if it’s remnants of the intense openness and camaraderie the molly made him feel or just being too exhausted to lie, but—“Yeah.”

“Same,” Dave says again, quietly. He chuckles. “No one tells you about this part.”

Karkat won’t admit it, but he remembers reading about it online while anxiously researching. Coming down from MDMA is supposed to take days, make you depressed and hazy and anxious, not to mention how badly his jaw hurts from grinding his teeth and the hangover from trying to drink his troubles away.

He says nothing and Dave doesn’t go to explain. He looks at Dave, though—his glasses pressing into his arm and kind of askew, but not enough to show his eyes.

_I should just ask_ , Karkat thinks. _I should ask why he wears them all the time_.

He can see himself, small and dark and warped, in the reflection of his shades. He tries to picture the missing parts of Dave’s face and can’t. He wants to get up because he can’t stand just lying here like this, not knowing where they are or how they got home and why they’re in bed together, but another part of him just wants to go back to sleep.

“You look like shit,” Dave finally says. “Want a hug?”

He didn’t think anything would be able to make him laugh, but this does. He shoves Dave’s shoulder.  “Fuck off, I’m fine.”

“Nothing hugging it out can’t fix.”

He expects Dave to try, but he doesn’t. He wonders if he’s watching him behind his glasses. He can smell his breath and it’s not much better than his own. He doesn’t know how to suggest they just go back to sleep, or say that he feels so sad and fucked up that he definitely wouldn’t turn down that hug if it were being seriously offered.

They lie there side by side for a while and Karkat closes his eyes. He opens them. He can’t tell what Dave’s are doing, but he isn’t breathing like he’s asleep.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Lux’s. I—don’t know where he is, actually.” Dave yawns. “I don’t super care.”

If they’re back at Sollux’s, Terezi must be here somewhere.

“Tell you what,” Dave continues, smiling. “Let’s sleep ‘til we don’t feel like shit, then go get food. I’ll buy you some greasy-ass diner breakfast, you’ll feel like a million bucks.”

Karkat doubts that. “Is Terezi here?”

“I dunno. Probably.”

His options are as follows: stay here, go back to sleep, then go to breakfast (lunch) at some shit diner. Spend the day with Dave. 

Or, he can get up. Find Terezi, go to her place, shower and make dinner. Spend the day with her.

The bed creaks as he gets up.

“I’ve gotta go.” 

He rubs his greasy hair. His horns are dry and scaly like he’s sick. 

Dave sits up on his elbows. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Then, for some reason, “Sorry.”

It’s quiet again. Karkat’s head is spinning from getting up and he’s sitting staring at the carpet, covered in Sollux’s dirty jeans and socks and t-shirts, trying to recuperate.  Dave flops onto his back and the bed jumps. 

“I think she’s in the living room.”

Karkat nods, swallowing, staring at a spot on the floor and trying not to throw up.

Dave begins, “Do—” but when Karkat looks up at him he stops.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He rolls over. “I’m gonna sleep. Peace.” 

And with that he turns away from Karkat, _pulls his shades off_ , and buries his face in the pillow. Without looking, he puts them neatly on the nightstand.

Karkat just stares at him with his mouth open.

Dave is small—he could climb over and wrench him off the bed to look at his face, and he probably couldn’t fight him off. If he didn’t feel so fucking sick, he might have considered it. But the more he gets to know Dave, the more he sees him move and talk, the more he realizes that the sunglasses aren’t some kind of shtick. Whether it’s physical or psychological, there must be some real reason he keeps them on.

Still staring at the back of his head and a secret so tantalizingly close, Karkat asks, “Why do you do that?”

He didn’t really expect Dave to say anything back, and he doesn’t.

 

He finds Terezi on the couch, half-awake, and Sollux out cold and crumpled into the armchair next to her. He can’t imagine how he and Dave managed to take Sollux’s bed away from him. Terezi says she doesn’t feel that bad—she never gets hangovers like he does, anyways—and maybe it’s because she passed out so early and did way less molly than he did, but she doesn’t seem to feel the same inexplicable melancholy that he does, and he’s scared to ask her if she does. It’s a difficult feeling to explain.

The day with Terezi goes as Karkat expected it to. They bus to Terezi’s place, the ground floor of a house she shares with Kanaya, and they shower and lie around in bed, talking, watching TV, napping. They make dinner together, and it’s nice—but he’s done this before. He wonders what Dave is doing, and what _he_ would have been doing if he’d stayed with Dave.

At eleven that night, Dave texts him.

  * _feelin any better_



He doesn’t know why he turns his phone away from Terezi.

  * _KIND OF I GUESS. YOU?_
  * _kind of i guess_



Karkat snorts at his phone and puts it back on the arm of the couch. He can’t figure out if Dave’s being serious or making fun of him, but he’s got a pretty good guess. His legs are stretched over Terezi’s lap and they’re watching TV, both dozing off. He feels better than he did this morning, kind of, and half-asleep, he’s marveling at the fact that an inorganic powder can make him feel this inexplicable fear of the unknown that’s been haunting him all day as a _side effect_.

His phone buzzes again. After pretending for a whole thirty seconds that he isn’t going to pick it up, he gives in.

  * _we should hang out_



His ears get hot. 

  * _WHY THE FRESH FUCK WOULD WE DO THAT?_
  * _why not_



He’d expected any number of stupid retorts, but not that: the one thing Dave could have said that he had no smart aleck response to.

Why not?

It doesn’t take him long to think of a handful of reasons _exactly_ why he shouldn’t hang out with Dave, including but not limited to what could easily become a habit of drug use. More alarming than the reasons themselves, though, is how little he cares about them. Something—a late-bloomer sense of teenage rebellion, risk, experimentation, _fun—_ make him, as embarrassing as it is, want to see Dave again. There’s no rule that says they have to do drugs to hang out. They haven’t been around each other sober yet, but there’s a first time for everything. Like having a human for a friend.

He texts back.

  * _ONLY IF IT’S DURING THE DAY._
  * _ahaha what why_
  * _I DON’T THINK I CAN HANDLE ANOTHER NIGHT LIKE LAST NIGHT._
  * _ever??_
  * _FOR A WHILE._
  * _thats chill, i get that_



Karkat blinks at his phone. He thought Dave would put up a fight. He gets another text.

  * _ive got shit to do at my place if you wanna come over_



A very specific kind of red flag goes off in Karkat’s head, one that echoes Sollux’s voice going _my wild disapproval_ and _he’ll chew you up and spit you out_. It’s one Karkat chooses to ignore.

  * _SURE, WHATEVER. I’VE GOT CLASS MONDAY, WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY BUT OTHERWISE I’M GOOD._
  * _sweet. ill let you know_



 

 

The day is set for that Tuesday. Karkat stays up late the night before and sleeps until noon to avoid anxious anticipation, then showers and fries eggs and tidies his apartment to kill time. He pulls a ratty sweater on with his nicest jeans and tries to make his hair less poofy. He keeps checking the address in his phone: 410–3326 w 27th ave. He looks iup what bus to take and checks his wallet twice for his bus pass, trying to imagine what Dave’s apartment looks like. Does he have a job other than doing shows? If not, he can’t make much money. He tries _not_ to imagine what it means that he didn’t tell Terezi what he’d be doing today.

On the bus, he looks at the address again; the suite number means it’s an apartment. It’s in the same neighbourhood as the one Karkat works in, a strip of grimy businesses and apartments and used car dealerships running along the sea next to the belching port. It’s not a strictly Alternian neighbourhood but, like he expected, it mostly is. And like most Alternian neighbourhoods, including Karkat’s, it’s pretty low-income.

It’s started to spit rain by the time he gets off the bus, hands shoved in the pockets of his jacket. He checks addresses on the buildings he walks by and finds it; orangey-beige with white paint-chipped window casings and a brass knocker on the door, and unlike Karkat’s building, it’s only a couple floors high. 

There’s no buzzer by the front door so he calls him. It rings twice before Dave’s voice comes tinny through the receiver.

“Hey, are you downstairs?”

“Yep.”

“Be right down.”

Karkat stands sweating on the doorstep playing with his phone until Dave thunders down the stairs inside and opens the door.

“Hey,” he says, out of breath. His hair is a little wet and he smells overwhelmingly sweet, like shampoo and laundry. Shades firmly on. “How’s it going?”

“Good.”

Dave steps out of the way and lets him in, leading him up the stairs. His briefs flash between the hem of his shirt and his jeans as he climbs, and Karkat looks down at his feet. Dave isn’t wearing shoes.

“You’re late,” he says as they get to the landing, mirth obvious in his voice.

“I slept late. Had to make breakfast.”

“And you didn’t bring me anything? Asshole.”

Karkat snorts. “I’ll remember to bring you some soggy eggs next time.” He swear he can _feel_ Dave take pointed note of the _next time_. The apartment’s hallway smells like cooking and stale air. The door Dave turns into sticks in the frame and he shoves it with his skinny shoulder.

“Old building,” he says, a retort to a comment Karkat didn’t make, and beckons him inside.

Karkat isn’t sure what he expected. It’s a cold, small one-room apartment, bright even with all the lights off, beige carpet, and a kitchen with a square of linoleum in the corner. The walls are spotted with posters for bands he doesn’t know, movies he’s seen a thousand times, photographs. There’s a small, messy bed in one corner and a table for two piled with paper and mail in the other. One of the two dining chairs is covered in clothes.

“The humble abode,” Dave announces. Karkat shrugs his jacket off and dumps it on the ground by the door, toes his sneakers off.

“Let me know when your episode of _MTV Cribs_ airs.”

“You’ll probably be _in_ it. _What’s up y’all, this my man Karkat, he’s about to get his shit kicked in Mario Kart, let’s take a closer look!”_

“You have Mario Kart?”

“I left it at Lux’s.”

“Great.” Karkat takes a few careful steps into the room in his socked feet and looks down the short hallway to a closet and the door to the bathroom. Other than that and what looks like a desk, buried under paper and books and clothes and cans, that’s the whole apartment. “Do you even have a TV?”

Dave knocks a glass-screened CRT TV at the foot of his bed as he walks by it. “Kind of.”

“What are we gonna do? If you brought me over here for a lively conversation I’ve got some bad fucking news for you.”

When Dave sits on the bed the sheets jump around him. “God, do you need a drink or something? Chill.”

“Would you start drinking at one p.m.?”

“Maybe I’ve already had a few.” 

Karkat just rolls his eyes. “How do you not have anywhere to sit in this dump?”

Dave scoots until his back hits the wall and as the sheets move, Karkat notices a laptop in the sheets next to him. Dave pats the bed.  “I won’t bite.”

“Fuck off.”

“Christ, you’re testy! Let me know when you want something to take the edge off.”

“What do you—”

“Nope, you don’t get anything ‘til you settle down. Sit.”

Karkat scoots up next to him on the bed, mad at himself for being so weird about this. He doesn’t know what he expected coming to Dave’s house and he doesn’t know why he has to be such a dick to him; it’s been a long time since he tried to make a friend and it’s easier to be an asshole than it is to risk ridicule, or worse.

Dave pulls his laptop onto his legs. “That’s what I thought.”

“I’m not doing it because—”

“Yeah, yeah, Mr. Straight-an’-fucking-narrow over here. I got it, college boy. Wholesome afternoon. Wanna find something on YouTube?”

“Sure. Dickbag.”

Dave just laughs. Karkat buzzes next to him while he picks something, kind of wondering if he was just joking about “something to take the edge off.” _God_ , what’s he even doing here?

Dave finds a documentary about a forest where people go to die and Karkat picks at his claws as they watch it. They say little things about the video but don’t talk otherwise, and Karkat tries to glance sideways to see Dave’s face behind his glasses, but he’s too close. Dave gets up after ten minutes to get a beer—he must not have been joking about starting early, at least—and offers Karkat one. He takes it because fuck it, it’s his day off, and it’s really cheap beer but he’s grateful to have something to do with his hands.

The documentary ends and they start talking about TV shows they used to watch in high school and start streaming those, too. He suspects Dave didn’t grow up here with an accent like that, and he’s surprised they’ve seen so many of the same shows. Karkat laughs easier after he’s done his beer. He leans over to put the empty can on the nightstand and notices something on the floor next to it.

“Is that a tiny piano?”

Dave laughs behind him.

“It’s a MIDI keyboard. Give it here.”

Karkat leans over the side of the bed to pick it up, a cord trailing behind it, and hands it to Dave, who already has his hands out like he’s accepting a fragile newborn baby. Even though Karkat can see a ring from a drink on it, and it was lying on the floor.

Dave tucks his legs up and plugs the end of the cord into his laptop, settling the small keyboard in front of it. It has buttons and knobs and a little screen. Karkat settles back down next to him in the comfortable pile of sheets he’s made, antsy hands already missing his beer.

“You play music?”

“Yeah. Not like Lux or anything, but, you know. I can put stuff together.” Dave looks at him and he can see himself in his shades; he smooths his hair down. “Am I a total dick if I assume you want to hear me play something?”

“No,” Karkat says quickly, trying not to sound too interested, but he’s curious. Anyone would be. “Whatever.”

Dave smiles, even with a hint of teeth.

“Well, if we’re gonna get all artsy ‘n shit, we should do it right.”

When he jumps off the bed, hiking his jeans up, Karkat expects him to go for another drink but he pulls a nightstand drawer open and roots through it, clanking and rustling. He pulls a canister out and pops the top off, then picks around with his fingers until he finds a little plastic bag and flicks it out. It’s white.

Karkat doesn’t know if he should be impressed or appalled or scared or _what_.

He goes with, “You have a problem.”

“It’s not—”

“I’m not doing that stuff again.”

“This is different!” Dave protests. “It’s mellow.”

Karkat moves his jaw back and forth. He remembers waking up next to Dave, all greasy and sore and sad. He remembers watching him sing, feeling like he could take on anything. He sighs.

“What is it?”

Dave sits on the bed in front of him, flipping the bag around in his hands.

“It’s just ketamine. It’s a dissociative. You...it separates your body and your perception of things?” He furrows his eyebrows. “Well, it’s a cat tranquilizer, but you know what I mean.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“It just makes you real calm and whatever, okay? Everything’s intense and heavy and I’ll play you music and it’ll be great. Trust me.”

“ _Yeah_ , I’m tripping over myself to put my trust into a human rapper with a substance abuse problem and questionable morals.”

“You only think it’s a problem ‘cause you never do it. You should _see_ substance abuse, man, I’m a goddamn angel.” He stops flipping the bag around. “You had fun the other night. _That_ was trusting me.”

Karkat rubs his arm through his sweater. “I guess.”

“Dude, if you really don’t want to, I’m not gonna be _that_ guy, like, whatever, I’ll grab you another beer—”

“It’s fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, what the fuck, right? What kind of shenanigans can we possibly get up to in this shithole apartment anyways?”

“Plenty.”

“I mean _bad_ shenanigans.”

“Same diff.”

Dave stretches off the bed to grab a hardcover book off the floor, just out of his reach, and when he leans over his underwear flashes again, black boxer briefs, and Karkat thinks, _the boy version of a panty shot_. He coughs to keep from chuckling. Dave crawls back up and gets a credit card out of his wallet. He knocks a bit out onto the book, balanced in his lap, and starts pushing it into lines.

“You’ll like this, it makes you relax,” he’s telling Karkat, “you’re pretty high strung for someone so young.”

“And you’re pretty laid back for someone whose life is like a shitty B-movie.”

“Says the financially stable nerd who’s never done K. Your life is an episode of _House_.”

Dave looks up at Karkat when he laughs, then back down. The two lines he’s made are neat and even, one slightly longer than the other. Whatever the book is, it has an Oprah’s Book Club sticker on it. He gets an empty pen casing from the nightstand.

“Ok, so, watch me. Don’t sniff too hard, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“If you don’t stop babying me I’m gonna knock your teeth out.”

“I’d like to see you try.” He holds the book on his knees, bows his head and snorts a line, the longer one. When he straightens up, his face is pink. “Shit,” he laughs, pushing a hand under his shades to rub an eye. “Okay. Here.”

Karkat takes the book and casing from him and, without pausing, needing in some way to be good at this, maybe even impressive for once, he snorts his. It burns the inside of his nose and the back of his throat like nothing else and he has to try hard not to cough or puke. He can _taste_ it at the back of his throat, the most shockingly bitter, sour thing. He furiously rubs his nose.

“Oh, Christ, that is fucking unforgivable.”

Dave laughs and takes the book from him, sets it on the floor and scoots back onto the bed, sighing. “It’s pretty harsh.” He lifts the laptop and keyboard and settles under them again, flicking between windows.

Karkat flexes his hands in his lap and watches him, nervously waiting for any change in his own body. Nothing yet.

“What should I be doing?” he asks him, not sure exactly what he’s looking for.

“Just sit. Listen.”

He taps around on the computer for a moment. Karkat looks at his bedroom and all the junk everywhere. He notices an old, sort of ugly electric guitar up against the desk, sitting on a bundle of cords next to a small amp.

“You play guitar?”

“I’m learning,” Dave says without looking up. A key on the keyboard sounds, not entirely like a piano.

Karkat thunks his head against the wall, heart starting to beat heavy and hard and slow.

“My chest feels funny.”

“You’re okay.” Dave’s voice is soft and even. Karkat watches his hands on the laptop, then the keyboard in front of him, setting things up. He tests a few keys, touches knobs with a thumb. His hands are small and so pale that bluish veins run down the back. Karkat looks at his own hands, soft grey and a little dry, bright yellow claws. He’s not sure that he’s ever touched human skin, not consciously, which is a weird thing to think about. It just never came up. It’s supposed to feel different, he’s heard, so soft Alternian claws could rip through it like crepe paper. He’s heard.

Dave starts playing a little tune with one hand on the keyboard, an up-and-down scale. The keys make synth sort of sounds, not piano keys, quiet and warbly.

“How does that thing work?” Karkat asks him, breathing through his mouth. That horrible, bitter taste drips down the back of his throat.

“Makes sounds,” Dave says simply. He’s using some kind of music production software, Karkat can see that, a bunch of panels he doesn’t understand. “Record ‘em, layer ‘em, loop ‘em back. One man band.”

“Cool.”

Dave starts putting more together now, putting a few keystrokes together and stretching the sounds, creating a weird, eerie soundscape. Karkat closes his eyes; the music feels too close and intense. He stretches his legs out across the bed, wagging his socked toes, feeling like they’re farther away than they’re supposed to be. He doesn’t notice Dave looking at him.

“How’s it going?” Dave asks.

“This feels weird.”

“Good-weird?”

“I think so. This stuff tastes terrible.”

Dave sounds breathless when he laughs. “It’s pretty bad.”

Karkat lets his hands flop to the bedsheets, moving them around between his fingers. Did the music get louder or is it just him? It sounds like it’s coming from inside his head. Dave taps on six square panels at the top of a the keyboard and creates a drum loop that keeps repeating, lines zig-zagging around on his laptop screen now. His hands hover above the keyboard,the buzzing, glitchy sounds he’s made looping back and forth and over again, and he waits. Then he starts playing, plunking keys in time to what he’s created, making a little melody.

“‘S pretty,” Karkat mumbles, overwhelmed by the intensity of the sound, knowing it must be whatever they just took and not some magical power of Dave’s music. It’s nice.

“Thank ya,” Dave quips, then coughs and stops playing. “Ugh, the back of my throat is numb.”

Karkat hears Sollux’s lisping voice in his head talking about flat human teeth and blow jobs. He jams the heels of his hands into his eyes.  “It feels like there’s something pressing on me. Like I weigh too much.”

“Yeah, right?”

“It’s ... relaxing.”

Dave laughs and goes back to playing, sniffing loudly. His melody changes, plinky and delicate. Karkat closes his eyes again, breathing in, breathing out, feeling like he’s sinking into the bed and down through the floor of the apartment, which, somehow, doesn’t bother him.

“How long have you been making music?” he asks Dave, voice airy like it’s floating away from him.

“Since always. My brother was a DJ when I was a kid, he was always letting me mess around with his stuff.”

He pictures Dave as a tiny child with giant sunglasses being lifted up to reach a turnable and says, “Cute,” before he thinks better of it. Dave doesn’t comment, but continues.

“I was into karate as a kid, or like, sword fighting? Napoleon complex, I guess.” He brushes hair out of his face and keeps playing, leaning back against the wall, fingers lazily running over the keys. “My bro still lives in Texas, though. I stopped fighting when I didn’t have him around to kick my ass anymore.”

Texas, as Karkat suspected. This stuff, like the stuff they did last week, gives him a sense of unfiltered speech, complete ease; he could get used to a freedom like this, and that scares him.

“What’s your last name?” he asks lazily.

“Strider.”

“I had a friend with a dog named Strider.”

“What’s yours?”

“Vantas.”

“Sounds like something from _Star Trek_.”

Karkat feels his vision move, as if he’s jumping away from his own face, a disconnect with where he’s supposed to be looking from and what he’s supposed to be looking at. Dave’s jean-clad knee next to his. His bare feet. With effort, he drags his gaze up his skinny arms, his shoulders, his throat and the knife’s edge of his Adam’s apple, his small mouth, lamb’s nose, cheekbones, mop of hair. He thinks, _he really is cute_ , loopy, more relaxed than he’s ever been, overwhelmed by the quiet music pouring into the room, by Dave. But there’s no over-complicating it. He’s just cute, and he can be cute. There’s no reason he can’t be.

He leans his head back against the wall again and closes his eyes, sighing, his hands limp at his sides. He wonders if what Dave’s playing is a song he’s already written or if he created it right now, while they were sitting here, and if he did then that’s amazing. And if he didn’t, that’s amazing too.

“I’ve—I’m not dumb, I mean, but I’ve never—” His voice comes out slow and he tries to lift his hand to gesture but it won’t move. “— _created_ anything.”

“It’s no big deal,” Dave says, sounding just as zoned-out.

“No one else has made those sounds exactly like you made them just now. You _did_ that.”

“You’re learning how to make people’s bodies stop killing themselves. I’m making robot sounds out of a circuit board. Kind of incomparable, dude.”

There’s a soft _flumph_. Karkat realizes the music is just looping now, Dave must not be playing anymore. He cracks an eye open and Dave’s slumped against the wall like he is, hand resting open-palmed on the bed next to Karkat’s. He closes his eyes again, body buzzing, prickling at his skin.

He inches the back of his hand towards Dave’s.

“Curing cancer doesn’t sound this good.”

Dave has a nice laugh, low like his voice, and genuine. Karkat feels like he’s floating above the bed—there’s no homework, no exams, no stress, just this messy apartment, this music, and Dave, Dave, Dave. Mysterious Dave. Stupid Dave. He moves his hand a millimeter at a time, not thinking, just feeling, wondering how good touch would feel right now, wondering if human skin is as soft as people say.

“Are you about to hold my hand right now, Vantas?”

He holds his breath. He floats back down to the bed, _flumph_ , and looks through his lashes at the back of his knuckle almost touching the back of Dave’s hand.

“No,” he breathes.

 

**_NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP, NEVER GONNA LET YOU DOWN, NEVER GONNA RUN AROUND AND DESERT YOU_ **

 

Dave’s phone goes off. Karkat leaps a foot in the air.

_“Fuck!”_ Dave swears, launching off the bed to answer it where it sits forgotten on the kitchen counter. “Hello? _What,_ John, I’m fucking busy!”

He looks down.

“I’m sorry for yelling. I know, our friendship is important. It’s important to me, too. Yes. Okay. What’s up?”

He pauses.

“ _Oh_. Uh—” He glances at beet red Karkat, sitting on the bed staring at his hands. “Come on up, I guess. ‘Kay. Bye.”

He hangs up and Karkat looks up at him for a few very long, very awkward seconds.

“Um. My friend is here. Just—picking something up.” He wobbles for a second.

“Do I have to act normal?”

“No, he’s cool. _Well_ , he’s not, but he won’t like, flip out at us.” Dave runs both hands though his hair and groans, then comes back across the room and flops on his back onto the bed. Karkat can’t tell if he’s looking at him behind the shades, but he feels like he is. He’s still loopy and heavy and high but he can already feel it subsiding. They didn’t do much.

“I have to go soon, anyways.”

“Seriously? Is it because—”

“ _No_.”

Dave sits up on his elbows. “I don’t believe you.”

The apartment door opens and Karkat is surprised to see that Dave’s friend is human and male, because he thought _friend_ was code for _girl_ and she’d be picking up a forgotten pair of panties, or drugs. This human is tall and has dark hair and skin, Dave’s complete foil. He’s wearing a backpack and a perfectly clean North Face jacket.

“Hi, Dave!” he says, jubilant, kicking his shoes off. They bang against the fridge. “How’s it—oh, woah, you have company. My bad, dude.”

“‘S okay,” Dave yawns, pushing himself off the bed. “Uh, Karkat, this is John. John, this is Karkat. He went to high school with Sollux.”

Karkat knows he should get up and shake this guy’s hand, but he can’t make himself move yet. He waves limply.

John grins with a set of the whitest teeth. “Nice to meet ya. Are you as bad an influence on Dave as Sollux is?”

“Nah,” Dave cuts in, clearly embarrassed, “he’s a good fuckin’ seed, he goes to—” He looks at Karkat. “Christ, I didn’t even ask what school you went to. Well, university, somewhere.”

“Oh! Do you go to UBC?”

“Yep.”

“Me too! What program?”

“Pre-med.”

“I’m in Anthropology! It’s a wonder I haven’t seen you around campus.” He stops and looks from Karkat, who hasn’t moved an inch from the bed, to Dave, standing unsteadily and rubbing his head, to the laptop and its trancey music. “Are you guys doing drugs?” he asks flatly.

“Yes,” they both say at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” Karkat says without thinking.

John doesn’t find anything weird about that and waves his hand at him. “No, I should have called ahead or something.” He cuffs Dave on the shoulder, smiling. “Shoulda known _you_.”

“Yeah, yeah, degenerate scumbag, I gotcha.” He wobbles over to his desk and unearths a stack of paperbacks from the mess. “These are yours, yeah?”

“Those are the ones! Did you like them?”

“Yeah man, they were great. I like his short stories, if you’ve got any more of those. If he’s written any.”

“Totally!” John tucks the books into his backpack. “I’m glad they were your thing. Reading’s gonna repair that big, dumb brain of yours, since you’re so bent on ruining it.” He raps Dave on the head with his knuckles.

“Fuck off,” he laughs. “I can only spend so many nights with you, Super Mario Sunshine and Fanta, we’re not all paragons of virtue.”

“It’s not easy bein’ me.” He shoves his feet back into his shoes. “I won’t hang around and bug you. Later, dude,” he says to Dave. With one hand on the open door, he pretends to whisper theatrically. “Pre-med. I like it. You’re dating up.”

Karkat chokes and starts coughing.

Dave kicks at John, who laughs his way out into the hall, and slams the door shut behind him.

At that exact moment, Dave’s laptop runs out of batteries and the music stops.

And then they’re just standing there in the perfectly silent apartment, managing to stare at each other around the gigantic elephant in the room.

Dave starts first.

“Uhhh—”

“I’m gonna go.” Karkat scoots off the bed, still dizzy but coming down now, thank God, and moving more easily.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m going to.” He stands up and rubs his face, slowly starting to feel bad for getting the fuck out of here like a bat out of hell, but not bad enough to reconsider. “I just have school stuff to work on. Class tomorrow.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

He teeters over to his sneakers by the door next to Dave’s high tops. Thinking about skin and hands and voices feels far-away and impossible now that he’s going back to stressing out, and boy, is that—is _Dave_ —eversomething to stress about. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. But, he looks at Dave, distinctly uncomfortable and trying to lean on the counter in a cool-looking way, Dave who borrowed novels from his best friend, Dave who likes the same TV shows and movies as him, Dave who played him music, Dave who is completely and undeniably cute even if he’s never seen all of his face, and he’s worried he knows _exactly_ what he was thinking.

 

 


	4. turntech

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is a shorter chapter than the other 3, but those were really long. so this is a normal-sized one. just how the flow of the story worked out. thanks for all the nice comments, you are all very very sweet.

_I’ve got this figured out_ , Karkat thinks to himself, staring up at the ceiling of his apartment. _Thank God in his almighty post-pubescent wisdom that I’m such a mature, responsible adult with a firm handle on my emotions and not a baby wiggler idiot child with a grade school crush._

He scrapes his claws down his face. He wants to say he’s confused, but confusion implies some kind of misunderstanding or uncertainty, and he’s read too many pulp romance novels and seen too many romcoms to doubt that the _thing_ that has slammed into him at high speed like a trailer on the goddamn freeway is, in fact, feelings for Dave. Gross, morbidly-fascinating, undeniably _romantic_ , physical feelings.

He vowed never to speak to him again after stumbling only half lucid out of his apartment the last time he saw him, when he’d almost touched him and his friend John had assumed that they were dating—which opened up an uncomfortable can of _how many people does he bring to his place_ , something that is in no way Karkat’s business—but it wasn’t going well. For the past two weeks, Dave had texted him every day. At first it was _have you seen this show_ and _how do i convince lux to play mario tennis with me_ , and then _watch this video of the pop punk band i was in in high school_ (it was adorable: 14-year-old Dave in skinny jeans and braces with a thicker southern accent than he has now, singing about girls with two other greasy-faced kids playing cheap guitars; he wore the same shades) and then, _so where’d you grow up_ and _how’s school going_ and _when are we gonna hang out_.

Karkat has to admit that Dave is fun to talk to, even sober. He’s sweet, weird, charming and uproariously funny, and it’s hard to ignore him. He sent him YouTube links and they watched videos at the same time, he added him on Facebook, he made him get Snapchat and sent him clips of music, selfies, close-ups of Sollux’s face. Karkat has been avoiding seeing him by diving head first into his school work, easy to do in the middle of exams, because texting him is one thing but wishing he could screencap his selfies is another entirely, and he can’t see him. He can’t.

It would be a little different if he were single. It would be embarrassing and messy, navigating whatever would come next with him and Dave, if anything, which is extremely presumptuous of him to consider because there’s no way Dave _likes_ him, but it would be doable. But he’s decidedly _not_ single.

School has helped him avoid Terezi as well, not because he’s mad at her and not because she’s done anything wrong, but because he’s ashamed of himself. They’ve been going out since middle school and there’s no way to justify even _thinking_ about someone like this and not telling her about it. Maybe things haven’t been perfect between them for a while, and maybe she feels more like his best friend than his girlfriend, but that’s no excuse to cheat on her. Sometimes he just feels like he’s disappointing her, that she feels the same way he does and there’s something she wants that he can’t give her; he’ll say the wrong thing and she’ll get quiet, and he’d correct himself if he knew what to say. They’ve been together so long that the thought of not being with her feels sick and wrong, but staying because it’s easy isn’t fair to either of them. He’s been meaning to talk to her about it for a while, and maybe the whole Dave thing is the reason to finally sit down and hash it out.

He blinks. He cleaned his kitchen and the open window, airing the bleach smell out, is making him cold. He rolls out of bed and pulls on a sweater from his understocked closet and thinks, _it’s stupid to say ‘the Dave thing’ like anything’s happening_. He thunks his head against the closet door. _He’s just being nice_. He’s not one to self-deprecate, but this is _Dave_. He’s a locally-known rapper, confident enough to thrive in front of giant crowds of people, with women—and, if he wanted it, which Karkat isn’t sure he does, _men_ —hanging off him and his every word. He’s a musician. He has a nose ring. Karkat knows he has a lot of good qualities himself, but doesn't feel like he's Dave’s type. There’s just no way.

He opens his laptop and spreads his textbooks out on the bed, meaning to prepare for his last exam tomorrow. But he goes on Facebook and navigates to Dave Strider, still surprised that Dave would use his real name. Every poster Karkat’s seen for his shows (and there’s been a growing amount of them around town) calls him LOHAC without fail, and even in the few news articles and interviews Karkat’s found online, he never uses his name. That might be explain him only having 200 Facebook friends. Maybe being added was a privilege?

Karkat goes through his photos, again. Dave in the flash of phone-cameras and SLRs, in dark hallways, at parties, his arm always around someone, drink always in hand. Dave on stage swathed in pink and blue lights, face flushed with drunkenness and excitement. Dave, visibly younger, with John’s arm over his shoulders in front of a campfire, no beer, no toque. Dave even younger and standing next to what looks like a taller, stronger version of himself with pointy shades and swept-back hair; the person is tagged _Dirk_ but the link goes nowhere.

Karkat shuts the window angrily and pulls up his biochem notes, mad at himself. Going through his Facebook photos like some smitten tween, taking note of his lack of Relationship Status, the bands he Likes, the places he’s lived; Texas, California, Oregon and here, a lot of places for a short life.

He makes another pot of coffee and sits back down to get some work done. He’s pretty confident about his handle on things school-wise, but finals are worth everything in the last year of his undergrad and he knows he can’t let himself get sloppy. 

But, speaking of sloppy, he gets a text from Dave. As if to prove something to himself, he doesn’t pick his phone up for at least thirty seconds after he sees it’s him.

  * ****_you done exams yet_
  * ****_MY LAST ONE’S TOMORROW NIGHT, THANK FUCK._
  * ****_are you joking_
  * _who has exams on saturday night_
  * ****_I KNOW!!! FUCKING KILL ME._
  * ****_so if youre done tomorrow when can i see you_



Karkat groans. _When can I see you_ , so unintentionally romantic. He knows he doesn’t mean it like that, obviously joking. He’s been using exams as an excuse to not hang out, but now that they’re over he’d just be lying.

  * ****_SATURDAY, I GUESS._
  * ****_what a coincidence, you can come to my show_



Of course he has a show tomorrow night. He’s been booked every weekend night in the two weeks they haven’t seen each other, Dave told him, trying to make it seem like it happened all the time but obviously very excited.

But, Karkat remembers he told Terezi they’d hang out, since he hasn’t seen her in a while either. He’s supposed to go to her place as soon as his exam’s done.

  * ****_I TOLD TEREZI WE’D HANG OUT_.
  * ****_so bring her too_
  * ****_nbd the more the merrier_



Something uncomfortable twangs inside Karkat at Dave being so okay with Terezi coming. Like he’d invite anyone but, also, that he wouldn’t mind his friend’s girlfriend coming because he’s just that—a friend. If Dave liked him, he’d be awkward about Terezi coming too, but he doesn’t, so there’s no reason she can’t come. And now he has to decide between not seeing Dave and dealing with the supremely awkward situation of having both Dave and Terezi in the same room as him.

It’s no contest.

  * ****_YEAH SURE. WHERE’S IT AT?_
  * ****_sweet. its at turntech on the other side of town_
  * ****_swish, i know. its a dj show with a bunch of other people, theyd never book me alone_
  * ****_11pm_
  * ****OK. COOL. WE’LL BE THERE.



 

Later, he calls Terezi and they talk for an hour, not about any of the important relationship stuff he’s planning to say but just shooting the shit, and it’s fun and easy to talk to her, and it makes him feel worse. She’s been his best friend his entire life, and here he is, inviting her to go to a show with him so he can make kissy faces at this _human male_ he has a crush on. She deserves better.

She’s overjoyed when Karkat says Dave invited them to his show. She says she’s been so bored since Karkat’s been studying, and it’ll be so fun to do something with him. His guilt grows. She says she might get to Turntech before him since it’ll take him an hour to get there from campus, and he’s fine with that—less awkward entrances with Terezi on his arm, or pointedly _not_ on his arm, or whatever.

The more time that passes, the more nervous he gets about it. He’d be fine showing up even later than late and missing Dave’s set if he has to. He’ll be stone cold sober after his exam and they’ll all be drunk, even Terezi, and Sollux will probably be there, and it’ll be easier to slip in unnoticed and completely in control of his emotions.

On the bus to campus, eyes glazing over his notes one last time, he thinks about being in Dave’s apartment. Feeling like he was sinking down into the bed, that comfortable weight like someone was laying on top of him. Dave’s bony fingers tapping out drum loops and bells and, most importantly, his soft, stoned voice: _are you about to hold my hand right now, Vantas?_ Dave knew he was going to, he must have been watching. If John had walked in a second later, he would have touched the back of Dave’s hand with his knuckle, curled a finger through his, pushed his hand into the sheets. His tone wasn’t upset, it was mirthful, teasing. He might not have stopped him, or in any case, he wasn’t mad.

He slams his sheaf of notes against his face. He doesn’t even _know_ Dave, not really—but he does, doesn’t he? They’ve known each other for a month now, sort of, and they text every day. Dave’s told him about his brother and they’ve talked about grade school and their friends, and Karkat’s talked about school and what he wants to do in the future, so what are they if not friends? Even if they’ve never hung out sober? He tells himself that they have to be. To be getting all worked up like this over a stranger would be ridiculous, but if it’s falling for a friend, he thinks, it’s somehow easier.

The exam goes well, even if his head’s foggy, and at this point he doesn’t really care. It still takes him the full three hours to complete it because it’s a fourth-year biochemistry course and it’s not easy, even for him. He does well in school because he tries hard, not because he’s especially smart.

The cold night air hits him like a train as he bursts out of the lecture hall, legs stiff with sitting for so long. It’s ten after ten.  A car crash on the bus route means a ten minute detour out of the way. It’s already ten forty-five. Good thing he wanted to be late. He closes his eyes and rests his head against the window of the bus, earphones in, playing the most relaxing music he could think of. He reminds himself that he’s just going to hang out with Dave. And Terezi. He’s done both of those things before and he has nothing to worry about. If Dave offers him drugs he’s going to politely decline, in no mood, and hopes Terezi won’t do anything, either. He knows she’ll be drunk off her ass, but that’s okay; she’s a cute, manageable drunk. It’ll make him feel better if she’s drunk, honestly, because taking care of her gives him something to do with his hands.

When he gets to Turntech, the queue goes around the corner. He calls Dave to come get him, but there’s no answer. Maybe he’s on stage.

He feels ridiculous but he goes up to the bouncer, an Alternian male standing a head and a half taller than him with giant Taurus horns.

“I’m friends with, uh, LOHAC—”

“Aren’t we all,” the guy snorts, cutting him off.

“Dave invited me, I swear to God, just—let me in.” He has no idea how to talk to someone like this, someone with so much power in a realm totally different than anything he’s used to. He’s just a bouncer, for Christ’s sake, but he might as well be God himself for all it matters right now.

“Unless you’re on the list,” the guy drawls, waving a very small piece of paper in front of him, “you get in line like everybody else, _kid_.”

Karkat blinks up at him.

“Uh, Karkat Vantas?”

The bouncer glares at him, then tips the list towards the one light in front of the door to read it. His face goes slack.

“Oh, Jesus Christ.” He pinches the bridge of his nose and jerks his head towards the door. “Get the fuck inside.”

Karkat grins to himself and scoots by him with a spring in his step. It’s crowded even before bag check, people standing around getting hand stamps, in line for the ATM, showing ID. He pulls his phone out and texts Dave, lingering inside the door.

  * ****_HEY I’M HERE. THE FUNNIEST THING JUST HAPPENED. WHERE ARE YOU??_



He feels better than he did a few minutes ago. He’s here and everything’s going to be fine. It’s half past eleven but they must still be here. But a minute passes, then two, and he doesn’t want to call Dave again, that would be desperate. He texts Terezi.

  * ****_HEY, ARE YOU HERE? COME DOWN TO THE ENTRANCE AND GET ME._



Again, a couple minutes pass, and he starts to feel stupid just standing there with his coat and backpack. He looks like someone’s kid brother, so out of place and under-dressed. Not that everyone is dressed up in the traditional sense, per se, but you know they’ve carefully curated their outfits, and _their_ plain white t-shirt means something, while Karkat’s is just old.

He realizes he’s going to have to find them; maybe there’s no reception in here. He’s never been to Turntech before—cover on the weekends is over thirty bucks, and drinks the same—and he doesn’t know his way around. He gets patted down and his backpack gets searched, then he gets a wrist stamp that looks like a diamond and he’s ushered inside with everyone else, like cattle to slaughter.

It’s shoulder to shoulder busy. There’s a DJ on a stage to the left disappearing into a flickering strobe light, too tall to be Dave, and there’s a stage at the back with dancers on it, tall Alternian girls in crop tops built like Greek goddesses. The air smells like perfume, sweat and fog machine smoke, deep house music pounding into his bones.

He doesn’t bother getting a drink; he didn’t bring any cash and assumed that wherever Dave is, he won’t be without booze. He knows the green room is usually to the left or right of the stage, so he skirts a wall towards the left-hand stage where the DJ is, wall to wall packed with dancers and people flooding towards the bar. He keeps checking his phone.

There’s a hallway that goes down behind the stage, and a human woman stands in front of it looking nonplussed and sucking an e-cig. Karkat sidles up and looks at her expectantly, trying to figure out what to say. The wrist stamp he has looks like everyone else’s, and she isn’t holding a list.

She looks down at him. Her vapour smoke smells like menthol.

“You Karkat?”

“Wh—yes? How did—”

She opens the rope gate. “LOHAC was pretty adamant. Said you’d have a backpack, and be looking nervous. Fits to me.” She nods down the hall. “Third door on the right.”

He squeezes past her and heads down the hall, sneakers squeaking on the concrete floor. He did it. He got here, late, but here, and Dave’s behind that door and probably Terezi and Sollux, too, and he can sit down on some swanky couch and be given free drinks and babysit his cute, drunk girlfriend, and maybe it won’t even be weird with Dave there. Or maybe Terezi won’t be there, and he’ll get to sit and talk to Dave. Maybe sitting too close on the couch.

He gets to the third door, steps back and re-counts to make sure. He smooths his hair down. He turns the knob.

It’s a smaller room than he expected. A couple of couches, a mini-fridge, a vanity mirror, white walls, white lights strung up around the corners.

The first thing he sees is Terezi.

She’s up on her knees, straddling Dave’s lap.

Furiously making out with him.

Then he sees Dave, under her, his hands hovering in the air above her thighs because he’s seen Karkat, and he grabs Terezi by the arms and knocks her off him onto the couch. She lands on both their cellphones. She sees Karkat. She breathes his name.

He’s still standing in the doorway, looking from her to him to her, her hands over her mouth, and him, his hair messed up from her hands, shrinking away from him and babbling something. Karkat yells over him.

_“What the fuck?”_

He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel, shame, sadness, confusion and anger all vying for top spot, losing quickly to absolute, unstoppable _rage_. He tells himself, _don’t do this, you’re not like this_ , because it’s just a stereotype that Alternians are violent and quick to anger, but he can’t help himself. He’s never been so fucking humiliated in his life. That’s why Terezi wanted to see Dave. That’s why Dave was okay with her coming.

“Karkat,” Dave and Terezi say at almost the same time, and Terezi knows Karkat better and scrambles away to the other end of the couch, definitely drunk. Karkat charges for Dave who, curiously, doesn’t move. He puts his hands up, but he doesn’t move.

He grabs him by the shirt and shoulder, hauls him off the couch and slams his fist into the side of his face. Terezi swears louder than Dave does and she bolts out of the room, to do what, Karkat isn’t sure; she’s scared and drunk but, he hopes, not scared of _him._

Dave just grunts.

His shades go flying.

Karkat tightens his fist in the collar of Dave’s t-shirt and growls, swings him around and slams him into the wall behind them, not hard, and lets his feet touch the ground. They’re roughly the same size and he knows Dave could hurt him if he tried, he _knows_ how to fight, but he isn’t. He has his hand over his eyes.

“Fuck,” he coughs. Karkat can’t tell if he’s drunk and he’s just breathing out his teeth at him, seething, staring at that hand covering his eyes and not even trying to quell his rage, so fucking angry that they both played him for such a goddamn fool, so mad at himself for thinking anything else was going on. He knew Dave’s interest in him had to have a catch, he just didn’t think it was wanting to fuck his girlfriend.

“What the fuck is _wrong_ with you?” Karkat spits, getting more and more worked up, thinking of being high on his bed and looking at his mouth and his fucking cheekbones, now red on one side from where his shades crushed into his face. He wants to punch him in the stomach. He wants to dig his claws into his throat. “You fucking invite me here so I—”

Dave moves his hand off his squeezed-shut eyes and Karkat stops dead, mid sentence. His eyebrows are so light, his eyelashes lighter and unimaginably, upsettingly pretty. He presses himself back into the wall, face scrunched up in pain, and he blinks his eyes open. He looks at Karkat, their faces only a foot away.

His irises are bright red, pupils dark garnet and not quite black.

“I’m not interested in _her_ ,” he says, voice low and clear, eyes meeting his steadily, unblinking.

The unmistakable emphasis rings between Karkat’s ears.

Not interested in her.

_Her_ as opposed to—

_Him_.

The realization knocks the air out of his lungs. His grip on Dave’s shirt goes slack but his hand stays there, claws clinging to the fabric.

_This has to be a misunderstanding._

His heart bangs around in his chest wild with adrenaline, staring into Dave’s eyes, his _eyes_ , watching him slowly start to panic too.

“Listen,” he says, voice coming more quickly now, eyes bouncing nervously around his face for an answer, squinting a little in the low light, “This isn’t the best time, but I—fuck, I don’t know how to say this—”

Karkat lets him go and steps back, mind screaming at him to do something, anything.

Dave senses his opportunity slipping away and his words tumble out rushed and all at once.

“You drive me fucking crazy, dude.”

Everything slows down.

His heart beats so hard it hurts, thundering his pulse through his hands, his head, his throat. They just _stare_ at each other, neither one sure what to do next.

Karkat freezes. To go from punching him in the face one minute to _this_ , now, it’s too much. Dave kissed Terezi, or Terezi kissed Dave, but either way he had his girlfriend of almost a decade sitting in his fucking lap, and no matter what else he wants to think right now he can’t unsee that, anger still pulsing through his veins. He fucking _kissed_ her! And now what, he’s supposed to kiss _him?_ He’s just supposed to forgive him and leap into his goddamn arms? Part of him wants to. A bigger part of him wants to punch him again.

He panics. He turns and storms out the door, slamming it shut behind him.

 


	5. derse sound club

He charges out of the club and down the street, seething, feeling the pavement stomping under each foot as he gets further and further away from everything that just happened, and he focuses on that feeling of his feet slamming into the ground to calm down. He walks and walks and walks, not sure what else to do. His phone vibrates constantly in his jacket pocket, one ring after another after another, but he doesn’t answer because he knows it’ll be one or both of them and he’s not ready to deal, if he ever will be. He eventually rips it out of his pocket and stuffs it into his backpack where he can’t feel it buzz.

It’s April and the night is still cold. He puts his hood up and keeps walking, the sidewalk wet with rain, businesses dark and closed for the night. Turntech is in the nice part of town, opposite from where he lives, and he passes groups of glitzy, beautiful women and guys his age with perfectly coiffed hair. It’s a human neighbourhood and that makes him nervous, not because he’s in any real danger of harassment but because he hates standing out, and he knows he doesn’t belong.

He wonders if his phone is going off. He can’t decide if he’s more angry with Dave or Terezi or himself, and he wants to bury his face in his hands and scream but it’s not the time nor the place; it’s not like it would help anyways.

_How long were they making out for_? It doesn’t matter, he _knows_ it doesn’t, but he’s thinking about how he stood by the doors to the club calling them, waiting politely, and they were in there cramming their faces together and pointedly _not_ thinking about him. He’s never been so humiliated in his life. Terezi cheated on him, by some sick karmic fate, with the guy _he_ had a crush on. If that isn’t the most disgusting situation in the world, he doesn’t know what is; being on the receiving end of an act of infidelity that in another life _you_ might have committed.

There’s a bus that could easily take him home but he wants to walk until he feels better, until his head is clear and he knows what on earth he’s supposed to do next. Is he imagining the feeling of his phone still buzzing in his backpack? It’s been a half an hour. Which one of them is it? He can’t imagine Dave would have anything to say, but _God_ , Terezi. He feels like there’s a spear through his chest he hasn’t pulled out yet and it’s just wagging along with him, making a bigger and bigger wound. She likes Dave. She wanted to fuck Dave. _Wants_ , present tense—for all he knows, they found each other after he ran out and they’re fucking on that couch right now, her and her tight t-shirt and sweaty hair and him and his stupid face and his—

His eyes. Karkat knows there’s a word for that, something humans get, and it’s on the tip of his tongue but he can’t bring it to mind. His irises were bright red, pupils red, too, but darker, the black-red of human blood, and his eyelashes and eyebrows were so blonde they were white. He replays it in his mind, Dave’s hand over his eyes, moving down, his white eyelashes on his cheeks, eerie and ethereal. His eyes opening, slowly drawing up, the bluish smudge under each one like he’d never seen the sun, kind of sick-looking but so, so beautiful.

He winds his foot back and kicks a rock on the sidewalk so hard it skitters into the door of a parked car and makes its theft alarm blare. He hurries off, half-running, still nowhere near his apartment. He has no fucking business thinking of Dave’s eyes or Terezi’s _everything_ ; he can’t even be mad at them in the right away.

Eleven turns to twelve turns to one in the morning. He walks slower, lazily, turning what he’s going to say to Terezi over and over again in his head, and his anger melts into a deep, gnawing sadness because cheating doesn’t happen in a vacuum: her kissing Dave means something’s wrong with their relationship, and he knew that there was, but to have her agree with him like _this_ isn’t what he wanted. She’s the most important person in his life and he wanted a sit-down adult talk, a “still-be-friends,” not walking in on her straddling some guy she’s seen all of two times—as far as Karkat knows; they might have been hooking up for weeks.

Only when he gets exhausted of thinking about his failed relationship with the sole woman he’s ever loved does what Dave said come back to him.

_I’m not interested in_ HER _._

A rush charges down his spine like an electrical current. Dave had panicked around his words, _I don’t know how to say this_ , and then, _you drive me fucking crazy, dude_.

Was there more than one way to drive someone crazy?

The look on Dave’s face had said no. There were hopefully-tipped eyebrows, nervousness practically dripping off him. Dave _likes_ him. Dave likes _him_.

But he wasn’t the one Dave kissed. Which sheds extreme doubt.

On a deserted street, Karkat shakes his head as if that would blow the clutter away and somehow make it clear why Dave would tell him that right then, whether or not he meant it and what he meant by it, and why the _fuck_ he did what he did with his goddamn girlfriend. He must have meant it in a different way. It must have been a misunderstanding, because what could someone like Dave possibly see in him, and whatever it was, why wasn’t it enough to stop him from kissing Terezi?

By the time he makes it into his apartment at two in the morning, his legs are shaking with exhaustion. He’s done what he does best: he’s neatly compartmentalized every aspect of this life-ruining problem into mentally-manageable ideas that he understands his position on front and back, and he’s decided on a first step towards figuring everything out. He has to check his phone.

He kicks his shoes off by the door, drags his backpack to bed and flops face-down into the unmade sheets. His head pounds angrily at him. He doesn’t want to know what either of them have to say, lest they make reality the terrible things he thought about on his walk; Terezi admitting she’s been sleeping with Dave for the past two or three weeks, Dave admitting that he only feigned interest in him to get closer to Terezi. He hopes against all hope that he’s wrong.

He pulls his backpack onto the bed and rummages around for his phone, tired limbs like jello and clumsy. He rolls onto his back and holds the phone straight-armed above his face like a holy book, staring at its dark screen. He taps the home button.

_5 Missed Calls_

_1 Voicemail_

_Message: Terezi (6)_

_Message: Dave (25)_

Somehow, that isn’t what he expected. Even after stewing for hours, he didn’t know what to expect. He unlocks the phone and looks at the missed calls: Terezi Terezi Terezi Dave Terezi. He’s not ready for the voicemail yet. He holds his breath and goes to Messages, stomach flip-flopping queasily, and he reads Terezi’s first.

  * ****_KARKAT IM SORRY_
  * ****_I DONT KNOW WHAT TO SAY_
  * ****_I KNOW NOTHING I SAY CAN MAKE THIS ANY BETTER, BUT I LOVE YOU_
  * ****_IT WAS ALL MY FAULT. I WAS DRUNK AND I WASNT THINKING AND MAYBE I WAS MAD. MAYBE WE HAVE TO TALK. I THINK YOU THINK WE DO TOO, NOT THAT THAT EXCUSES ANYTHING. YOU DESERVE BETTER THAN WHAT HAPPENED AND IM SO, SO SORRY KARKAT_
  * ****_YOU CAN AND SHOULD BE MAD AT ME, IM MAD AT ME, BUT YOURE MY BEST FRIEND AND I OWE YOU AN EXPLANATION OR SOMETHING OR ANYTHING_
  * ****_PLEASE, PLEASE CALL ME WHEN YOURE READY_



He rubs furiously at his eyes, trying not to cry. That’s it, then. Of course she understands. He knows her, he knew she wouldn’t fly off the handle and turn it around, get mad at him or play games—she’s so, so smart, and she fucks up like anyone, but she’s the most noble fuck-up anyone could ever ask for. Somehow, he feels better. This had to come to a logical end, he could feel it happening, and it’s heart-wrenchingly painful that _this_ was the end it came to, but he knows that when they sit down and talk it’ll be for the better. She deserves whatever she wants, even if it’s not him, and vice versa. He actually feels better having read that.

Wait. _It was all my fault_ , she said. _I was drunk and I wasn’t thinking and maybe I was mad_.

_She_ came onto _Dave_?

He’s—surprised. He sits up, fluffs a pillow behind his head and lies down to read Dave’s messages.

  * _dude come back_
  * _karkat_
  * _im sorry ok_
  * _im really really really really sorry and i mean it_
  * _i dont know what happened_
  * _i know theres nothing i can say to make you talk to me again but i know theres no way you can resist the temptation of reading all these texts so_
  * _im totally in the wrong and im not gonna insult either of us by begging for forgiveness because damn_
  * _i fucked up_
  * _ill always be a fuck up_
  * _but_
  * _ok i dont know where im going with this_
  * _i shouldnt have said that stuff. not the time or place but i freaked out_
  * _but you know what i meant right_
  * _im into you_
  * _like grade school butterflies tongue down your throat kind of into you_
  * _and i know i sound like a fucking idiot because making out with your girlfriend isnt a great segue into getting you to make out with ME but_
  * _im tired of being around people who are used up and jaded like me_
  * _i know you think youre boring but youre not_
  * _youre so full of life youre crackling at the edges_
  * _youre so genuine you make me fuckin ashamed to be myself dude_
  * _and youre so unaware of how hot you are and it makes me want to launch myself into space_
  * _i know theres a better word for it than hot but i cant think of it right now_
  * _ok its been like 15 minutes youre definitely not coming back_
  * _but whenever you read this just text me back or call me or show up at my door, i dont care_
  * _if its tonight or tomorrow or months from now if i see you im gonna apologize better and youd better fucking believe me_



The texts stop there.

Karkat’s head throbs with adrenaline as he goes back and reads them, _how hot you are_ and _make out with me_ and _crackling at the edges_ , and he’s gotten so used to texting Dave that it’s like he can hear his voice in his ear as real as if he’d been speaking. There’s no misunderstanding. Dave likes him.

He’s struck by the way he didn’t mention that _Terezi_ was the instigator, not him. Terezi came clean and Dave could have mentioned it but he didn’t, he didn’t blame her to make himself seem better, even though it would have been the truth. He couldn’t have done that by accident—anyone’s instinct would have been to lay blame where it was due—and there’s something so shockingly selfless and empathetic about that that it renders Karkat speechless.

He listens to the voicemail. It’s Terezi, yelling over the sounds of the street and telling him to call her, half hysterical. It was sent before the texts. Somehow, he feels guilty for making her worry. It shouldn’t have come to this, and it’s as much his fault that it did as much as it is theirs; if he hadn’t walked in on Dave and Terezi, she would’ve walked in on him and Dave.

He reads Dave’s texts again, and again, stuck in the inevitably weird limbo between sadness over one relationship ending and excitement over another beginning. He’ll go see Terezi tomorrow and everything will be different. Dave, he can think about later.

 

It’s cold and clear when he leaves for Terezi’s the next morning with an inexplicable craving for cigarettes, probably more a craving for something to do with his hands than anything else. He isn’t scared until she answers the door wearing shorts and one of his t-shirts, her eyes teal from crying, and he realizes that this really is it.

They lie on her bed for hours and everything comes out, the tiredness, the dissatisfaction, everything. They’re both still in love but it’s a different kind of love now, and they need something new; they’ve been together their whole lives and it’s not right anymore; this wouldn’t have happened if they didn’t need different things now. Terezi apologizes again and again for what happened with Dave and, with all his rage from yesterday gone, he forgives me.

“I’m sorry for getting so mad,” he admits quietly, his face buried in her hair. He hasn’t taken his shoes off and his feet hang over the end of her small bed.

“It’s okay. You had the right.”

“Were you scared of me?” he asks, remembering the way she screamed and scrambled off the couch, his guilt overwhelming.

“Not because I thought you’d hurt me.” She laughs and he feels her breath on his chest. “I’m surprised you didn’t maim Dave.”

He doesn’t say anything at first, wanting to be honest and trying to figure out how to phrase this.

“You’re into him, huh?” he ventures.

“...Yeah."

He sighs quietly.

“Me too.”

She rears back to look at him with wide eyes and after a second she starts laughing, and then he’s laughing too, and they laugh clutching at each other long after it stops being funny.

 

He’s known he was going to talk to Dave again as soon as he read those texts, but _when_ is another story. Part of him (some undeniably passive-aggressive part of him) wants to make him wait and stew as some kind of punishment, but a bigger part of him really wants to see him. He’s mad at himself because he doesn’t even _know_ Dave, not really, and the idea of being with someone other than Terezi feels so unthinkably weird to him after so long, but—and he feels better about this after his talk with Terezi—it’s also maybe the most exciting thing that’s happened to him in a really long time.

Dave doesn’t text him again, which only worries him for a second, because it’s _Dave_. He’s probably out having fun and killing brain cells, not obsessing over his potential loss of Karkat. 

Karkat works every day the next couple of days, trying to make as much money as he can in the time between semesters. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say to Dave after all _that_ , and wants to wait until he has a day off to go see him to better articulate himself in person. He freaks out quietly to himself behind the counter of the bookstore, excited and giddy and mad at the idea of liking someone, almost wishing he had any friend he could talk to about this kind of thing. He’ll text Dave on Friday, meet him, and say—what? I like you? The way you didn’t throw Terezi under the bus to make yourself look better was so unexpectedly selfless that I’m beyond impressed? I can’t stop thinking about your fucking face?

He checks Facebook Friday morning and Dave still hasn’t posted anything since Saturday night. That could be a coincidence. He’s busy, right? It would be ridiculous for him to assume that’s about him. Maybe he should have texted him back before this, but he’s so fucking bad at this kind of thing and he needs to be in front of him, or else risk a series of texts where he doesn’t make himself clear and sounds like an idiot, or worse, an awkward phone call.

He doesn’t think to text Dave on Friday until he’s already at work, so he stuffs his phone in his pocket and forgets about it, and it’s a slow day at the store but his manager’s always around and he doesn’t get a chance to take it out. Dave, his near-translucent skin, white eyelashes, red eyes, floats in and out of his consciousness; for the thousandth time since it happened he imagines being back in Dave’s apartment with the comforting weight of ketamine pressing him into the bed, lifting up above his own body, and how easy it would have been to roll over and press his mouth to Dave’s shoulder, his throat, his lips, and Dave would have let him. He hadn’t ever thought he’d want a human like this, they look so...funny. Not _bad_ funny but so foreign and strange, thin lips, white eyes, watery, so fragile-looking and bright. But Dave doesn’t look bad. None of them look _bad_ , he doesn’t dislike humans, but they’re just so—different. Ethereal. Problematic.

But here he is anyways, rushing out into the street after work and fumbling for his phone to text some human and tell him he wants to see him. He pulls his phone out and— _tap tap_. It’s dead.

It’s seven and almost dark out. He zips his hoodie up and waits for the bus home, knowing Dave will already have plans by this time and what if he can’t see him until tomorrow and God, it’s already been a week, he’s probably already moved on to whatever his next interest is.

But he thinks about those texts again ( _grade school butterflies_ and _you’re so full of life you’re crackling at the edges_ ) and maybe it’s not ridiculous to think that he’s still waiting.

By some stroke of luck straight the fuck out of _Serendipity,_ he looks up, and on the fat lamppost that the bus stop sign sticks out of is a rain-wet poster that says LOHAC on it in big red letters. There are other DJ and stage names below his, smaller—does he have _opening acts?_ —and a little line drawing of Dave himself, shades and toque and nose ring and a flop of hair, and below that “Derse Sound Club” and today’s goddamn date.

It’s in two hours. He’d have time to go home, shower, put some decent clothes on and surprise him at his show. Maybe he’d have time to text him, but is it wrong that he likes surprises? He wants to see the look on Dave’s face when he shows up. Derse Sound Club is one of the few venues he’s been to, and it’s not exactly close to his place. He’ll have to hurry.

The bus is late and when he finally gets to his building he can’t find his keys in his backpack right away, but he’s got time. He jumps up the stairs to his floor two at a time, bangs inside his apartment and shucks his clothes on the way to the bathroom, and the hot water is finicky but it gets the job done. He pulls a shirt and jeans on and makes toast because he didn’t have any money to get something to eat on his break. The show’s already started, but Dave’s not going on first if there were so many names on that poster. He cracks a beer for courage and tries to tame his hair and imagine what he could possibly say to Dave when he sees him.

He finally texts him when he’s on the bus to Derse Sound Club, anxious thumbs thrumming with nervous energy.

_\- HEY, SORRY FOR NOT REPLYING. I’M COMING TO YOUR SHOW TONIGHT_.

Doors was an hour ago; maybe he’s preparing to go on, but In any case, there’s no reply. The bus rolls to a stop a block down from Derse and he can already see the lineup. He doesn’t bother talking to the bouncer because Dave had no idea he was coming, and he doubts he’s just put his name on every guest list ‘just in case.’ As he waits, he has to stop himself from texting again, feeling, if nothing else, comfortable in the mostly-Alternian crowd, wishing in a weird way that Terezi was with him because she’s always fun to wait for things with, wishing he was already inside where, somewhere, Dave awaits.

Music pumps out the doors as he gets closer, warbly, deep and persistent bass and a male voice rapping words that get drowned out by the music. The closer he gets, the more nervous he gets, and tries to will himself to calm down, saying, _this is a good thing, he likes you and everything is good and this is going to be fucking amazing_ , and he believes it, but doesn’t feel any less nervous.

When he’s only a couple feet from the doors, the three Alternian girls in front of him start talking about LOHAC.

“He’s been at every thing, every night.”

“I know, right? He’s killing it lately.”

“I can’t remember the last time I went to a hip hop night where he didn’t do a show. He must know someone.”

“But you like him, right? I mean—he’s really, really good.”

“If you like that goofy shit, yeah.”

“Well, he’s cute.”

“For a human dude.”

“I heard he only likes Alternian girls.”

“I heard he only likes Alternian _boys_.”

A deep, male voice slices Karkat in two.

“ID?”

He fumbles for his wallet and pulls his driver’s license out as the girls disappear into the club. The bouncer looks at the black and white photo of 18-year-old Karkat and waves him past, and then he gets patted down by another bouncer, gets his hand stamped by a girl behind a desk and pays his cover, and squeezes by a slow-moving group past coat check into the club.

It’s not a big club; a single stage, a single floor, swirling pink lights and heavy bass and a back-lit bar and there, up on the sole stage, in a big grey t-shirt and high tops and low jeans, LOHAC. Dave. Karkat realizes how few times he’s actually seen Dave in person when he sees him now, surprised by the planes of his face like he’s never seen him before, and it feels like it’s been forever since the last time. But something’s different. Karkat stands at the back of the room by the door and watches him, and it’s not like the other times he’s seen him on stage; it’s like those girls said, he’s normally goofy, fun, playful, grinning his face off, crouching and letting girls touch him, laying down on the stage, talking to the crowd, and he’s not like that now. His toque is lower and the music is louder and from the back Karkat can’t hear him clearly but he’s yelling, moving quickly, almost angrily and more like the other rappers Karkat has seen, but the crowd fucking loves it and Karkat can feel the floor under his feet vibrate with the force of people jumping, and moshers’ thrown drinks flow in lit-up arcs over the churning mass of bodies.

Karkat starts inching his way towards the front, the space too small and too packed for him to make progress very quickly. He can tell Dave’s drunk or something else by the way he moves, a little imprecise, and it must be near the end of his set because his hair’s stuck to his forehead with sweat. He’s nervous. Does Dave just perform like this sometimes, or is this somehow related to him? Is that stupid to even consider? He doesn’t see Sollux up behind him, the back of the stage dark. Karkat squirms through bodies, trying and failing to stay pressed to the far wall to avoid getting sucked into what is quickly becoming a full-on mosh pit.

He gets a few rows from the front, seriously jostled, sweating, praying Dave notices him or his set ends or something, _anything_ happens, because he’s not used to being around so many people and some asshole’s horn is knocking him in the side of the head and maybe this was a bad idea, maybe this was a really, really bad idea.

Whatever song he was on ends and the crowd positively screams, stomping their feet and hooting, but Dave doesn’t laugh or take his toque off and rub his hair like Karkat’s seen him do, he doesn't smile. He goes to the shadowy back of the stage and picks a beer up off the DJ’s booth, lifts it to his mouth, and drinks. 

And then he drops the empty bottle on the stage, by accident or on purpose, where it shatters on his feet and the black tangle of cords nearby.

You can hear him swear over the mic, but he doesn’t laugh it off or really do anything. He just wipes the back of his hand with his mouth and sort of kicks at the glass shards—and then a giant Alternian guy in a t-shirt with the club’s emblem charges onstage. Dave clicks his mic off before he starts yelling back at him, and he does yell, gesturing to the glass and then to the crowd, so obviously three drinks past too many, and Karkat can’t imagine what he’s saying but it can’t be good. The house music comes on loud enough to drown them out and the crowd loses interest, pouring towards the bar for a second, third or fifth round.

Karkat watches in horror as Dave shoves the bouncer in the chest.

The bouncer, a head and a half taller than Dave, who seems markedly smaller than he did when he was lit up and rapping, shoves him back, and he stumbles back into the broken glass and almost falls.

“Dave!” Karkat calls out, trying to push through the people streaming back towards the bar and through the people standing adamantly at the front who are determined not to lose their good spot. _“Dave!”_

Dave somehow, over the music and the voices and the bouncer yelling, pointing off stage, hears him. And he looks at him, as far as Karkat can tell, from behind his dark shades, and it’s like everything stills—Dave, who he gives butterflies, Dave, who thinks he’s hot, Dave, who wants to kiss him, is looking at him. Despite the locale and the situation, he gets his own very high school brand of butterflies.

Ignoring the bouncer, who yells something else before giving up and storming off stage, Dave comes over to the front of the stage, slack jawed, and sticks his hand out for Karkat to grab. He pulls him onto the stage and now that Karkat is finally here, he forgets everything he planned to say. He’s glad the lights aren’t on anymore.

Dave goes first.

“What are you doing here?”

“I should have texted you back,” Karkat says quickly, “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You got my texts?”

“Yeah.”

“You aren’t mad?”

“Not anymore.”

Dave’s mouth is still open; he can see his top row of teeth glinting in what brightly-coloured light they have. Karkat’s heart thumps violently in his chest because he knows there’s only one question that logically follows and it has to do with them liking each other, with kissing and touching and fucking and he doesn’t even half know where to begin all that.

But, of course, Dave does, in his own mixed up way. So uncharacteristic of the Dave he walked in here and saw, but pretty characteristic of the Dave he’s gotten to know, he starts to babble.

 “I know I came on kind of strong but I’d had a few, I mean, I’ve had a few right now, too, but it’s cool if you’re not into me and I shouldn’t have assumed you were, you just—”

Karkat watches a flush spread across his face to his ears, and what he’s supposed to do becomes obviously, blindingly clear. He grabs Dave by the face and kisses him, a childish, furious crush of mouths, and he feels him breathe in against him and then stop breathing altogether. His mouth is so, so fucking soft, the skin of his cheeks under the palms of his hands like butter, his hair so light it feels weightless. Karkat can’t remember if he’s ever touched a human, and even if he did, it didn’t matter until now. He feels Dave’s hands snag limply in the front of his shirt and he hardly kisses back, dazed, drunk. It’s charming. It’s the first time Karkat has kissed someone new in six years.

He pulls back and keeps holding his head in his hands, nervously gauging some kind of a reaction. He’s pleased that for the first time tonight, he sees Dave smile.

“Goddamn,” he says dreamily, and Karkat laughs.

“You, uh. Assumed right.”

“No shit,” Dave breathes, and Karkat wishes now more than ever that he could see what Dave was looking at behind his shades, not only because seeing his own dim, warped reflection in them has always been unnerving. Dave’s hands slide up his forearms, lightly, cautiously, until they reach his hands and lift them off his face. He holds his fingers in his own for a moment before dropping them. “You should come with me.”

“Yeah.” As if he’d ever do anything else. 

Dave pulls him off-stage by his wrist, nearly tripping down the stairs. They head down a hallway behind the stage.

“How drunk are you?” Karkat asks, skeptical but still dizzily coping with the thought of having kissed him, replaying it over and over again in his head.

_“Very,”_ Dave informs him, sounding so giddy about it that Karkat laughs. “Fuck, I can’t believe you’re here. I never thought I’d hear from you.”

“I didn’t know what to say," he admits. "And then when I did, I didn’t know how to say it. And then I didn’t think you’d care.”

Dave stops walking, spins around, and knocks Karkat back into the wall and kisses him, hands diving into his hair. Karkat’s worried he’ll cut his tongue open on his teeth but of _course_ Dave knows how to do this, his lips warm and yielding, insistent, sour like beer. He groans and kisses back, touching his neck, his throat, shocked by the feeling of blood and pulse so close under his skin, and how warm he is, and _God,_ he can kiss. He hears people pass through the hallway behind Dave but doesn’t open his eyes, instead pulling him closer, kissing deeper, Dave’s weird, soft tongue stroking his.

Dave pushes him back and leads him down the hallway to a door he shoves with his shoulder to get it to come free from the frame. “You’ve really never been with a human?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m honoured. Consider yourself in good hands.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“How can I _not_? Have you seen you?”

Karkat flushes red, not wanting to say anything that would escalate this game of compliment-giving. The tiny room looks like it’s used for storage, one side packed with stage extensions and lights, a small tweed couch and a mini fridge repurposing it into a green room. Dave leans over an old, dusty TV and unearths a wooden chair from under a tangle of cords, then jams the chair under the doorknob.

“There’s no lock,” he offers as a quick explanation before he throws his toque on the couch, twists his fist in the front of Karkat’s shirt and kisses him again, violent and determined. With a steady mantra of _I can’t believe I’m doing this I can’t believe I’m doing this_ running through his head, Karkat kisses back and lets himself be eased back onto the couch, trying to forget where they are and everything that isn’t Dave and his lips and his tongue and his hands with their flat, bitten nails pushing up under his shirt.

“Lemme know,” Dave mumbles against his mouth, “if I’m being a jerk, this can wait ‘til later.”

He wants to say _come to my place_ and leave for somewhere with a locked door, or go for coffee and _talk_ or something, but the same part of him that wanted to try molly and ketamine, the part of him that wants to be able to surprise himself and is batshit crazy over Dave, stops him. It’s exciting. He likes it.  “This is good.”

Dave laughs and kisses him again, running thumbs under his cheekbones, down his jaw, fingers tracing the pointed tips of his ears and back into his hair to grab him, tipping his head back, biting his black lips. Karkat can feel his dick hard against his leg—he has at least a layman’s knowledge of human anatomy, he’s been on the internet—and he digs his claws into his hips, trying not to buck up into him.

“Your teeth are all flat and bumpy,” he says against his lips, laughing and hoping no one passing outside the room can hear him, some troll bumpkin who’s never kissed a human. “I can feel them with my tongue.” He reaches up and sticks a knuckle against Dave’s teeth, bared and laughing, and Dave smacks his hand away and kisses him again, once, twice, like he doesn’t know how to stop.

“Is that a hint?” 

“Wh—”

“Is that a _request?”_

Dave sits back far enough to look at him and Karkat wishes more than ever that he’d just take those stupid shades off because all he can see is him grinning, which could mean a thousand things. But he’s pretty sure he knows what. What’s the coolest and most diplomatic way to tell someone they can blow you if they want to?

Dave doesn’t wait for an answer and kisses drunkenly, affectionately, down his throat, slipping back until his knees hit the floor. Karkat stares down at him in horror and lifts his hips when Dave motions for him to, watching him kiss his stomach and pull his jeans down around his thighs, and is completely unable to reconcile the terror of _mouth_ near _junk_ equals _razor sharp teeth_ _and a trip to the emergency room_. He tries not to panic. He can’t even imagine what someone’s mouth would feel like, those weird lumpy teeth and that soft, malleable pink tongue. He moves his own tongue around inside his mouth, black and tougher than Dave’s, and can’t imagine it would ever feel good.

But he feels Dave’s breath on the bare skin of his lower stomach, fingers pulling his briefs down, and he doesn’t care what it’ll feel like, _anything_ is good. He stares nervously at the ceiling, rush of blood leaving his head making spots dance across his vision. He reminds himself, _new is good. Like rap and amphetamines and tranquilizers, new is good_.

Maybe it’s because he’s drunk, but Dave just looks at him for a second, kneeling between his legs, staring at his bulge, flushed deep red (but, to Karkat’s perpetual humiliation, still faintly _neon_ ) and kind of phallic shaped but more of a tentacle than anything, weakly prehensile. Dave’s eyebrows are so high they’re visible over the top of his shades.

“Aaare you nervous?” he asks Karkat, sounding like he’s trying not to laugh. Karkat risks looking down at him, mad at how fucking _cute_ he manages to look even now, face flushed, trying so hard not to smile.

“Shut up or I’m not doing this.”

“It’s not gonna hurt.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Dave laughs softly, and when he leans forward to kiss the crux of his thigh his bulge brushes his throat and Karkat drops his head back against the couch to look at the ceiling again, lost in the permanently virginal thrill of just being _touched_.

“Alright, don’t.” He sticks his tongue out and licks him from base to tip, and he jolts like he’s been shocked, all the air burned up out of his lungs. He licks him again, again, and already his hips are lifting off the couch, looking for more of what he was so afraid of a moment ago.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Karkat swears behind his hands, every fear he’d had now blasted out of his head with just a few licks; it isn’t like _anything_ else, so soft and precise and almost gross in how foreign it is, curling around his tip, and then Dave sits up on his knees and _sucks it into his mouth_ and it’s so intense that he almost wishes he were anything other than sober to dull the sensation, so he doesn’t come in thirty seconds like a stupid teenage boy.

Dave sits back and laughs, slides his fingers up and down the way his mouth was.

“You still scared?”

“Oh my _God,_ stop _talking!”_ Karkat laughs, burying his face in his hands. Dave chuckles at him and pushes his hair back out of his eyes, then licks him to be a brat, kisses it wetly with his open mouth. “You drunk son of bitch.”

“Alright, alright.” He presses his tongue flat against the underside. _“Pushy_.”

Karkat groans into his hands, body thrumming with tension and excitement and nerves, and Dave sucks him in earnest, as if to prove a point, moving more quickly, one hand at his base the other on his thigh. He takes just the tip into his mouth, sucks, and slowly presses down further and further until it’s in the back of his throat and he _swallows_ and Karkat curses unintelligibly, shaking with restraint. He moves faster after that, tongue swirling as the string of babbled curses above him get louder, and Karkat’s hand finds his arm and grabs it, neither pulling him closer or pushing him back, an unspoken _don’t you dare go_.

In less than a minute Karkat’s back is arched off the couch and he squeezes Dave’s arm and hisses, “I’m gonna come if you don’t slow down,” and Dave just sucks deeper and faster. _“Shit_.” He lifts his hand off his arm so his claws don’t go through his shirt, or skin, and he runs his hand through Dave’s hair, grabs it. “ _Shitshitshitshitshit”_ —and he comes so hard he feels winded, ears ringing, eyes screwed shut. It goes forever, the most unimaginably and unbearably satisfying thing.

Dave swallows until he can’t and then it drips down his chin and he pulls off, fingers still moving on him, and he laughs softly and nudges Karkat’s hand off his head. It flops back down to the couch. Karkat covers his face, burning cherry red, heart _thud dud dud dudding_ in his chest and refusing to slow down, his brain short circuiting as it tries to reconcile _blowjob_ and _Dave_ and _swallowed_ and _I’m still alive_. His bones are liquid. Dave squeezes him once more and lets go, sitting back on the floor and wiping his hand across his mouth. He’s breathing hard.

“Meets or exceeds expectations?” he chirps, smug as anything. Karkat, still with his hand over his face, head tipped back against the couch, just waves a hand at him. “You should see me when I’m sober.”

“I bet,” Karkat croaks, trying to work up the courage to ever look at Dave again. This was ... an unexpected turn of events. When he got here, he wasn’t even sure if he’d have the courage to _talk_ to him, let alone _this_. He moves his hand and blinks at the ceiling, then slowly down at Dave, still sitting on the floor grinning to himself. “You—”

The door rattles.

“What the fuck?” A voice comes from the other side. “Is someone in here?”

_“One sec!”_ Dave yells, springing unsteadily to his feet. He looks at Karkat. “We should go."  

 

Outside, Dave offers Karkat a cigarette and he takes it, and they smoke leaning against the club outside, shoulder to shoulder. Karkat still feels loopy, giddy, boneless, and Dave can’t stop looking at him.

“I did _not_ expect this tonight, man. I thought you’d like ... seen my terrible, sappy-ass texts and been like _fuck it, I’m out_.”

“No,” Karkat says, distantly. “They were ... nice. I just—I didn’t know what to say.” He remembers something and looks over at Dave, who is slowly sobering up and has managed to stop smiling goofily to himself.“Why didn’t you tell me Terezi was the one who kissed _you?”_

Dave looks down and blows smoke out his nose.

“It was your girlfriend, dude. You’d been going out _how_ long and I’m just some guy, what kind of asshole would I be if I thought I was more, like ... important than that.”

Just like he thought: Dave _chose_ not to blame Terezi because he thought it was the right thing to do. He didn’t want to break them up.

“But, uh,” he goes on, “I’m guessing you broke up anyways. What with the making out, and the sucking off.” 

Karkat laughs once, a humourless puff of air, lost, like the teenage boy he tried and failed to avoid being, in thoughts of sex, which have been relatively foreign to him up until now. He’s always liked sex, but it’s never been such a heady, all-consuming thought before. He wonders if this is something that will go away.

“Yeah, but it’s not your fault.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was due. I mean, you _were_ the catalyst. For both of us.”

“Clearly.” He knocks their hands together softly, touching the backs of his fingers with his own. “So. That was okay?”

“If it was any more _okay_ I wouldn’t have been able to stand up after.”

Dave laughs and Karkat realizes, with a slippery-slope-nononono-don’t-go-in-there sinking feeling, that he likes making Dave laugh.

“Good to know,” he hums, looking, once again, immensely pleased with himself. They finish their cigarettes in silence, hands still lightly touching in the warm, dry night air. Karkat doesn’t want to go back inside, tired after work and not looking to get drunk, and not wanting to babysit a Dave any more drunk than this one. He clumsily throws his cigarette into the gutter; Dave flicks his neatly away.

Karkat clears his throat. “You could, uh. If you aren’t doing anything. Come to my place, or something. Stay the night.”

Again Dave’s eyebrows climb higher than his shades, white in the garish orange street light, and Karkat worries he’s said something wrong. Like drinking genetic material is one thing but sharing a bed is going too far.

“Um. Sure. Let me grab my stuff.”

 

Dave leans his head tiredly against the bus window on the ride home and keeps a hand on Karkat’s leg like a less-intimate proxy for hand-holding. Karkat can smell him and it’s somehow comforting, the imperfectness of sweat and booze and that movie-theatre stickiness that clubs have reminding him that this is a real person who likes him and not a figment of his imagination. It’s not that late but he’s obviously exhausted. Karkat wonders if he was supposed to do another set at Derse.

It’s only when he’s opening the door to his apartment that he realizes he hasn’t cleaned, not expecting, in his rush, to be bringing anyone home. Dave, who was resting his head between his shoulder blades as he unlocked the door, stumbles when he steps inside and flicks the light on. He kicks clothes into the bathroom as he comes down the short hallway and into his one room, almost dormitory-style, with a kitchenette and one window and a bed too big for the space, with a bright white duvet.

“Nice place,” Dave says, dropping his bag in the kitchen. He stuffs his toque into his jacket pocket and drops that, too. “You’re so neat.”

Karkat opens his mouth to argue but remembers Dave’s place, the dusty keyboard on the floor, the cords and chargers and clothes, and doesn’t.

“Thanks.” Karkat throws his coat over the back of his computer chair and goes to where Dave stands wavering in the kitchen. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, just—sobering up.” He laughs. “Man, I can’t remember that last time I stayed at someone else’s place.”

“Oh.” Instinct says they should be touching or something, at least looking at each other, but despite getting to third base they’ve only had acknowledged mutual attraction for inside of two hours, and it feels weird. Or it does to Karkat. “You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Dave says quickly, slipping his hands under his shades to rub his eyes. “Well, I’m used to _staying_ at people’s apartments but _staying_ means _passing out_ and not _sleeping_ , and there’s a difference.”

“Which one are you doing tonight?”

He hums to himself like he’s thinking.  “Sleeping.”

They take their clothes off in the light of a cheap bedside lamp, Karkat in boxers, Dave in boxers and his t-shirt, and it doesn’t look like he’s undressing any further. They get into bed and Karkat feels the decade-old feeling of having a sleepover. Dave sits up against the wall and looks around the apartment, at the few posters and the bookshelves and rack of clean dishes on the counter, while his fingers move absentmindedly up and down Karkat’s bare leg.

“Do you sleep in those?” Karkat asks him, finally figuring if he’s already seen him without his shades, he’s okay to ask. Dave doesn’t say anything right away but touches them, like he didn’t realize they were there.

“No. Not usually.” And, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, he slips his shades off his face, folds them, and puts them on the night stand. Karkat _stares_ , eyes wide, as Dave squints down at him. “Can we turn the light off?”

“Sure.”

As soon as it’s dark he feels Dave’s breath on his face and then he’s kissing him, soft, sucking his bottom lip, the mad urgency of earlier gone, or anyways muted. He can still see Dave in the light from outside his window, not squinting anymore, but watching him. He tries to pick which of the thousand things in his head he should say.

“You look good,” he blurts out, and it must be okay because Dave smiles a little. “Without them.”

“If you say so." He lies down next to him. "I’d wear contacts or something if I could see without the shades.” The ever-present unaffected coolness is gone from his voice, and he’s just tired. He plays with the hem of Karkat’s boxers under the quilt, always, always fidgeting. “D’you know what it is? My eyes and my hair and stuff?”

Karkat blinks at him. He hadn’t looked it up. “Some ... human thing?”

Dave flicks him and he laughs.

“Albinism. Not like, the worst, but it’s where your body doesn’t create pigment, or not enough of it. My skin’s okay, but my hair’s almost white if I don’t dye it. See?” He reaches up and pushes his hair back, and even in the dim light Karkat can see the inch of near-white hair at his hairline. “‘S why I wear that toque so often. And without eye colour, my eyes are just—blood-coloured. Like you guys, I guess.”

Karkat holds his breath, figuring this is as good a time as any to bring this up, if he hasn’t already noticed. Tentatively, he slips a leg in between Dave’s, nudges him closer, and he relaxes into him without complaint.

“My eyes’ll be that colour when I’m older.”

Dave shakes his head. “Rust bloods’ eyes go darker.”

“I’m not a rust blood,” he mumbles, feeling stupid that he’s ever cared about something that will be so obvious to everyone in a few years. “You didn’t notice?”

“Oh.” Dave stops and shifts, moving his hand up Karkat’s leg to the small of his back, and feels him shiver. “I thought maybe it was a trick of the light or something. It did look, uh. Bright? I’ve never seen that before. What does that mean?”

“I have no fucking clue, honestly,” Karkat admits. “Some kind of mutation, I guess. It’s bright, bright red. Like your eyes.” Dave grins at him. “That wasn’t supposed to be romantic, I’m serious.”

“I know, it just sounds funny. _My blood and your blood are the same colour, it’s fate, baby_.”

Karkat laughs and shoves him. “Shut up, it’s fucking stressful. I’m gonna look like a freak.”

“Well, welcome to the nasty-looking freak club.”

“Are you joking? You’ve got—Christ, you’re _gorgeous_ , you could have anyone. _Freak_ ,” he scoffs. Then he realizes this must be the first time he’s said something like that, because Dave starts to smile.

He jeers, “I could have anyone, huh?”

“Fuck off, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, you’re _swooning_ for me and my sick blood eyes. Think you’re coming on a little strong?”

“Says the guy who basically texted me _romantic_ _poetry._ Excuse me for trying to break up your stupid albiny pity party!”

“It’s _albino_ , you loser, I thought you were a _doctor_!”

Dave laughs and laughs and doesn’t shut up until Karkat kisses him and slips his thigh between his own. For the first time, Karkat opens his eyes and he sees Dave’s own and not his own weird reflection, and it startles him into seriousness. He wants to say something like  _I can’t believe this is happening_ or _I can’t believe you made me come_ but he doesn’t know how Dave handles sincerity and besides, Dave has his face smushed into the pillow, _his_ pillow, and he’s smiling at him like he’s falling asleep, and his hair’s flopped over his cheek and he looks startlingly young, and it can wait until morning.

 


	6. apt 310, 4221 glenview

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi again! this one's real short but it came to a logical conclusion and the last chapter sort of left things hanging. story's not technically over, more stuff to do. congratulations on canon davekat
> 
> if you're not into sex stuff, ctrl+f to "Karkat clicks his tongue"

Karkat has a long, stressful dream about racing go-karts and remembers none of it when he wakes up. He forgot to close the blinds the night before and sun streams in through the dirty venetian blinds and makes his white duvet—a stupid thing to own, but when he turned twenty-one he had a crisis and thought he had to start looking like an adult—glow blindingly bright. He remembers Dave and doesn’t move, listens for and finds the sound of him breathing softly next to him, and what feels like the edge of a foot pressed to his calf. He closes his eyes again and thinks about last night, kissing Dave onstage and in the hall and watching his head between his legs as he got sucked off for the first time. He’s never been obsessed with sex, maybe because him and Terezi started dating so young and it became natural so early, but ever since he got those first texts from Dave it’s been all he’s thinking about, almost uncomfortably. _What’s it going to be like? What are we going to_ do? And then last night happened. He’s surprised he slept at all.

He realizes this is the second time he’s woken up next to him, though, by Dave’s own distinction, last time it was less _sleeping_ and more _passing out_. He knows the difference between the two things is a sobriety thing, but also, he thinks, maybe a trust thing. You pass out wherever, but you _choose_ who you sleep next to. Sleep is a vulnerability.

He looks over at Dave, seeing his face in full light for the first time, almost at pale as the pillow his head is on, blue smudges under his eyes, white eyelashes resting on his cheeks. He’s lying on his stomach, his arms folded under his pillow, and the sheets have been twisted by their legs and kicked down. 

Karkat rolls onto his side to face him, trying to decide between going back to sleep and waking him up. He’s going to be hung over but _God_ , look at him. He can see the white hair at his roots shining in the sun, the bare back of his arm under the pushed-up sleeve of his giant t-shirt. Lower, black boxer briefs and skinny thighs. _He’s in my bed_ , Karkat thinks. _Dave Strider is in my fucking bed_.

He sits up and his new one-track mind reaches his hand out and touches Dave’s back, his weirdly soft t-shirt warm against his skin; Dave doesn’t move, his features don’t even flicker. He moves the flat of his hand up the valley between his shoulder blades almost to the back of his neck, then down along his spine and over the crest of his ass. Then back up. Dave doesn’t stir but he _has_ to be awake, so Karkat keeps doing it, sliding his hand from shoulders to ass, absorbed in just _touching_ him and the curve of his spine and the body heat that seems to be coming off him in waves. Just touching his ass and back through his clothes is enough to make him want him.

He slips fingers under the hem of Dave’s shirt and Dave cracks an eye open, probably awake the whole time. Karkat stiffens. Dave’s smiling, at least.

“G’ morning.”

Karkat doesn’t move his hand, fingers resting just against his bare skin.

“Can I...”

“Sure.”

He slides his hand under his shirt, running along his spine and up to his shoulders, back down into the dip at the small of his back and over his ass, down to the back of his thigh, and back up, slowly. Repeat.

“You’re so warm.”

“You’ve got body heat too,” Dave says, eyes closed again, still half-buried in the pillow.

“Not like this. _God_ , humans are so _soft_ , I have no idea how you don’t just like, rip yourself open on shit all the time. Your skin’s like paper.”

“Only to you. I like Alternian skin, it’s smooth ‘n clean. Don’t get greasy, no hair. Like marble statues.”

“You’re so fucking weird.”

“You’re into it.”

Karkat keeps rubbing his back, pressing his hand into him firmly like he’s appraising him. He lingers at the curve of his ass for the first time, still through his boxers, and Dave breathes a puff of air like a laugh. Karkat can’t stop looking at his face, still not used to seeing it bare. He’s disarmingly pretty, if not a little gaunt.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Turn over.”

Dave grins and rolls onto his back and keeps his eyes shut; it’s still bright. Karkat almost offers to shut the blinds but doesn’t, preoccupied, worried that even moving will break whatever insane spell is letting him touch Dave. He pushes his shirt up, sliding his hand from his stomach to his chest like he did before, just feeling him. He’s so _skinny_. And—

“It’s hard.” He can see it through his boxers, curving up towards his belly. Something inside him starts screaming.

Dave stifles a laugh. “Most people would say _you’re_ hard. It sounds less weird.”

“Excuse me for not being _painfully familiar_ with your stupid human linguistic—”

“You can touch _it_ if you want.”

Karkat, very aware that Dave is making fun of him, scowls and, as if to prove a point, doesn’t hesitate. He lies down next to him—finally feeling weird about sitting up next to his prone body like some kind of researcher—and runs his hand down his stomach and lifts the waist of his boxers and pushes them down. His dick rises up, flushed and harder-looking than Karkat would have thought. It’s nice. He touches it with the flat of his palm and Dave’s lips part silently so he tests it with his fingers, wraps his hand around it like what seems natural. The small of Dave’s back lifts off the bed.

“God, _kiss_ me or something, don’t just—”

Karkat rolls forward and kisses the corner of his mouth and then his lips, pushing up on an elbow to loom over him. Their knuckles hit as Dave lifts his hips and pushes his boxers down the rest of the way, then kicks awkwardly out of them. He runs his hands up Karkat’s arms, down his bare back, up his ribs and down his chest, mapping him with fingertips and bitten nails. Karkat pushes his hair out of his face with his free hand and kisses him deeper, tightens his grip, in back-of-mind disbelief that this is the same Dave he saw on stage last night that had people jumping and yelling and dancing and throwing drinks, Dave with a nose ring and charisma and secrets. He can’t reconcile the two. How many people have gotten to see him so pliable like this?

"You’re a quick study.” Dave laughs against his mouth. "Do you like it?"

"Yeah."

"Is it gross?"

“Do you always talk this much?”

“No, actually. So, you’re _welcome_.” He kisses him again and grabs his wrist to still him. “But fine, let’s do it your way.”

He pushes Karkat back and flips on top of him despite his babbled protests. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, whatever, you’re right.” He kisses the hollow under his jaw and down his throat. “I talk when I’m nervous.”

“You’re nervous?”

“Shhh.”

Karkat slips his hands under Dave’s giant shirt and notices him falter, if only for a second, as he pulls it over his head. Dave dives in to kiss him again and hook hands in his boxers so he can’t look at him, but he can feel the ridges of his solar plexus and every rib and his hipbone like a knife’s edge and he worries, quietly, and forces himself to shut up.

It feels—weirdly natural. Dave moves between his legs and kisses and kisses and kisses him until it almost hurts, doesn’t get mad when Karkat nips him, bumps their hips together and grinds and it’s _perfect_ , disconcertingly intense.

“So, uh,” Dave mumbles against his mouth, pushing him back with a hand on his jaw, “how do you wanna do this?”

Karkat kisses him. He knew this was coming because human men are weird about this, right? But maybe Dave isn’t. He’s kind of cagey, but maybe not always, or not about this.

When he doesn’t say anything, Dave laughs again. “Lemme give you some ideas.” He runs his hand from Karkat’s knee down to the crux of his thigh, teases him. “I’ve had Alternian guys fuck me. I’ve had Alternian _girls_ fuck me. _Or_ —” His fingers go lower and he slips two into his nook, and Karkat’s back arches clean off the bed. “—vice versa.”

He slides them in to the knuckle and Karkat feels his teeth against his cheek as he grins, and he’s speechless, overwhelmed, thrown, because even something so simple as _fingers_ is only an option to fingers without claws and _God,_ Dave has let girls fuck him, and something about being in any way penetrated, and Dave asking what _he_ wants to do, makes this so unexpectedly intimate.

He slips his arms underneath his and runs his hands up his bare back and holds him, chest to chest, Dave’s arm cocked back and fingers still inside him. The closeness is only a little uncomfortable in the unfamiliarity and, with it, the vulnerability. Dave crooks his fingers; he breathes in.

“This,” Karkat says quietly. “Like this.”

Dave kisses his cheek again, and his jaw, and the pointed tip of his ear, and fingers him, shifting his weight back to his knees.

“Great.”

He shifts against him and their comparable heights means they’re forced to look right at each other, so Dave buries his face in the crook of his neck to avoid it. He lines up and slips inside him effortlessly, wet, bears the claws against his back, stifles a groan and moves shallowly, shaking with restraint. Karkat’s embarrassed by his obvious response, how wet he is and how badly and blatantly he wants this. It’s not like what he’s used to, thicker and less yielding inside him than anything Alternian, almost an uncomfortable stretch.

He can’t stop the low clicking noise that starts in the back of his throat, but it’s a natural response to mating and all Alternians do it, it’s not like he can help it. He doesn’t think anything of it until Dave inhales sharply and slows.

“You’re doing that thing,” Dave breathes against his throat, nails scraping down his sides to grab his hips; he drags him against him, as deep into him as he’ll go, and Karkat twists a fist in the sheets.

_“So?”_ he hisses. “Like _you_ haven’t heard it, of all fucking humans.”

“Never.” He kisses him so hard their teeth hit and drives back into him, shifting forward, gaining leverage. He presses his knees up. “No one does it.”

“What do you mean they don’t do it? How do they _not?”_ He still can’t stop the quiet, insect-like hum, almost mechanical-sounding, even as they’re talking about it. His has always been particularly bad; when he was a teenager it would always start in public.

“Teach themselves to stop. Think it’s weird.” Dave’s breath hitches, hands shifting, and he presses one of his knees higher and kisses him again to hide a moan. “ _Fuck_ , it’s hot.”

“You’re fucking gross.”

“You love it.”

Karkat digs a heel into his lower back, urging him closer in a silent _shut up, shut up,_ and sweat and desperation take the place of whatever nervousness was in either of them, hands and nails pulling at hips, shoulders, dragging hair out of each other’s faces to _look_ , more used to the way the other kisses now, snarls, pushes, sucks. Dave finally stops trying to be quiet, Karkat stops trying to be cool, and Dave hooks a leg over his shoulder and it’s almost too much, being with someone new and someone who knows how to do this with someone _other_ than him, and the outside experiences and angles and infuriating expertise is overwhelmingly, empirically good. Dave swearing, bucking into him, holding a hand against his throat, is _good_.

Dave gives one of his hips a pointed squeeze and says, “Turn over,” out of breath, and in any other situation Karkat would have laughed in his face for thinking he has _any_ kind of commanding tone, but as it is he sits up and scrambles to kiss him, hands diving into his hair, then turns.

“Wait,” he says, up on his knees and half turned around. This is the first time he’s been far enough away from shirtless Dave to really see him; he’s just as skinny as he thought, pale even for a human, and on his bony ribs is—He grabs his side and turns him. “Is that a _switchblade?”_

Tattooed against the back of his ribs are the black lines of a switchblade, small-ish, with the blade out, crudely done and sort of ugly. He remembers seeing a glimpse of something when he pulled his sweatshirt off on stage, before he yanked his t-shirt down. He starts laughing and Dave pushes him over onto his hands.

“You were eighteen once too, asshole.” He slicks sweaty hair off his face and grabs his hips and yanks him towards him. “Don’t ruin this for me.”

Karkat can’t stop laughing until Dave slides back inside him, and he drops to his elbows and groans. The bed hammers into the wall; Karkat tries weakly to push the frame away and gives up to clench fists in his pillow and starts clicking again, rearing back. Dave leans forward and presses his chest to his back and breathes into his hair, and reaches around his hip and touches him. He almost shouts.

“I’m gonna come,” Dave says all in a rush, lips against the back of his neck, and his movements get rough, frantic. “ _Fuck,_ you’re so—”

He thrusts so hard Karkat digs his claws into his arm and his body goes tight, shaking, and he only half hears Karkat go _don’t you fucking stop_ over the static rushing in his ears as he comes, swearing so loud that the people on either side of the apartment _have_ to hear, and if they don’t, they do when Karkat comes, swearing, moments later.

Neither one moves right away, hearts thundering, Dave’s face buried in the back of his neck, Karkat bracing himself on his forearms. Dave’s hands run up his chest and stomach and back down, and then he pulls out and flops into the duvet, bundled against the wall. They both buzz with receding pleasure, speechless with it.

“Christ.”

Karkat clicks his tongue and sits, trying to smooth his hair down. He eyes his wet sheets with disdain. “You could’ve let me _get_ something.”

“You didn’t ask.”

He didn’t, did he? He couldn’t have thought of anything during that if he tried. He gets up and grabs a towel from the bathroom, puts it down and lies on top of it.

That was—unexpected. He likes sex, sure, but the idea of it has never made him feel so stupid and crazy. He likes how hard Dave grabbed him, at his hips and hands and shoulders, clumsy in his passion, like he thought he’d go somewhere. He was _good_. The thought of what else he might know how to do seems unimaginable.

The back of Dave’s hand is against his arm but otherwise they’re not touching, trying to come down, neither one ready, despite everything, for post-coital intimacy. Karkat can hear him breathing next to him. He’s sure if he looked, he could see his heart beating through his chest.

“You’re so skinny,” he says, as if looking for an explanation, and regrets it; Dave didn’t have anything bad to say about _his_ body. Dave chuckles. The knuckles against the back of his arm move.

“Steady diet of amphetamines and Big Macs. You know how it is.” He turns to look at him and shields his eyes from the light, and Karkat likes the flush that still shows across his cheeks. “Or maybe you don’t. You probably know how to feed yourself like an adult.”

“I try.” He notices Dave still has his hand over his eyes. It’s gotten brighter since they woke up. “Do you want your shades?”

“Please.”

Karkat hands them to him and Dave slips them on, takes his hand, and pulls him forward until he’s close enough to kiss. It’s not a chaste, tender kiss, it’s as deep as the ones before and it surprises him. Dave makes a quiet noise. His lips move in a slow slide and the cool edge of his glasses presses into Karkat’s cheek. He lets him go.

“Was that okay?”

“The kiss, or the other stuff?”

“Both. Mostly the other stuff.”

Karkat kisses him again. He feels loopy, helpless, almost unpleasantly happy, like he doesn’t deserve it. “So good that I think we should do it again sometime.”

“Sometime like next week or sometime like twenty minutes from now?”

“Sometime like after breakfast.”

Dave grins. “Where do you wanna go?”

“Here? I’ve got bacon and stuff, might as well.” He rolls out of bed.

“You weren’t kidding about feeding yourself.”

“More like feeding _you_. You’re gonna turn two-dimensional if you don’t eat something.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad.”

 

So Karkat pulls a shirt on and fries bacon and potatoes in a big cast iron frying pan and Dave watches him curiously from the small cafe table against the wall and plays with his phone.

“Are you on Facebook?” Karkat asks.

“Yeah, why?”

“You didn’t post anything last week.” He glances at him. “Were you like ... sad? About what happened?”

“Yeah,” Dave says, no hesitation. “I liked you. _Like_ you,” he corrects. “Was that not obvious? What with the dick and the kissing and the desperate texts?”

Karkat’s ears go red. “I guess.” He pokes at a thick rasher of bacon with a fork. “I wasn’t gonna assume it made you _sad_ or whatever.”

“Of course it did, that sucked. I thought you hated me.” He sighs and stretches his arms and legs out. “And yet, here we are.”

“Here we are.”

“Not a bad way to start a Saturday morning.” He puts his phone down and crosses his skinny ankles. He put his shirt back on earlier, but no boxers, and Karkat keeps thinking about how his bare butt is on the chair. “What do we do for the rest of it? You wanna hang out?”

“Sure.”

“Any plans?”

“Nope.”

“Is there any chance some plans could involve fucking and getting stoned and watching TV, all day long, with me?”

“Let’s see how breakfast goes, but it’s coming in at a solid 60% right now.”

“I like those odds.”

 

They eat breakfast at Karkat’s tiny table and it’s the first time Karkat has ever seen Dave consume anything that wasn’t a liquid or crystalline or sucking on a lime wedge. He eats, unsurprisingly, like he hasn’t had real food in days. Karkat makes coffee and in a greasy french press and Dave drinks most of it. His hair is sticking up on the side he slept on and it makes him look infinitely less intimidating. He smells like bacon and basil and humannness and Karkat can’t stop looking at him. Dave Strider is half nude in his kitchen. LOHAC’s butt is on his kitchen chair.

“You don’t care that I’m still wearing these, right?” Dave asks, tapping the arm of his shades.

“You can’t see when it’s bright out, can you?”

“Not really, but.” He shrugs. “Just checking.”

“It’s fine.” Karkat stands and clears their plates. “Do you usually take them off around—people?”

“You mean people I’m sleeping with?”

“Yeah.”

Dave rolls his shoulders, waits a beat. “No.” He watches Karkat’s mouth quirk into a smile as he sets their plates in the sink. “Don’t get cocky.”

“I would _never_.”

“Asshole.”

Dave stands and meets Karkat in the middle of the square of linoleum that is his kitchen, and Karkat takes his wrists in his hands and they kiss, surprisingly impassioned and toothy. Dave laughs when Karkat nips his lip and he tastes blood.

_“Asshole,”_ he says again, and pushes him back.

“That wasn’t intentional! Your mouth is so—” He makes grabby motions with his hands. “—soft? Like, mushy.”

“ _Mushy,_ that’s new. Breakable, delicate, I get it. Pale little human boy no match for big strong troll.”

“We’re practically the same size!” He looks at the top of Dave’s head as if to check, and some childish part of him wants to get a hardcover book, a pencil and a doorjamb.

“But your skin’s not _mushy_.” He kisses him again, just quickly, and Karkat’s embarrassed by the way he steps forward to keep it going because Dave notices and smirks at him. He flops back onto the bed and the duvet swallows him up. “Got any movies you wanna watch?”

 

Like Dave suggested, they spend the entire day in Karkat’s apartment, leaving only briefly to meet the guy Dave buys weed from in the parking lot of a Mac’s down the block; the guy’s a head taller than both of them but surprisingly amiable, and they walk around the block to avoid suspicion while Karkat listens to them talk about audio equipment, and when him and Dave exchange money it’s so smooth he almost misses it.

“I just buy from a girl I go to school with,” Karkat tells him on the way back. “She brings it to lecture and I literally just stuff it into my bag in the back of the lecture hall. It’s terrifyingly easy.”

“God bless the public school system.”

They get tolerably stoned and watch _Serendipity_ , then _Big Daddy,_ and then it turns into an Adam Sandler marathon. They make it through about half a movie’s worth of touching thighs and ghosting fingers down arms each time before they fuck again; Dave pushes him flat against the bed and rides him and he comes in less than a minute because it feels _nothing_ like what he’s used to, and Dave teases him about being a quick date until the end of _Little Nicky_. Karkat can’t sit next to him without touching him, can’t bear the heat coming off his body in waves and his ropey calves rubbing intentionally against his own, and when he showers at two in the afternoon and comes back smelling like Karkat’s soap and looking stupidly small wrapped in an ugly yellow towel, they do it again, and Karkat leaves a mark on his shoulder.

“Sorry,” he apologizes later, and Dave chuckles.

“Nah, I—” He slips his glasses back on; he had taken them off, which Karkat was overthinking. “Is it weird that I sort of like it? Biting?”

“No weirder than liking mating sounds.”

They’re lying on their sides, face to face, Karkat’s arm curled under his head and Dave breathing against his throat. _Fifty First Dates_ is buffering on Karkat’s laptop, pushed down by their feet.

“Do you remember what you said to me the first time we hung out, at Lux’s place?”

God, that seems like a lifetime ago. Did he want Dave then? What did they even _talk_ about? He remembers thinking he was shorter offstage, and swimming in the giant t-shirt he wore. He remembers standing with him in the kitchen trying to stop his eyes from bouncing around every surface, and—“What, the fetishist thing?”

“Yeah. Does that—I mean, you’re not _right_ , but if you wanna talk about—”

“It doesn’t bug me.” They’re too close to look at each other and Dave is too low, but he looks into his hair, at his silvery-white roots. “You being with Alternians or whatever. I know you’re not being a jerk about it, you’re not gross, so—whatever.” He dances his fingers nervously across the back of Dave’s forearm, the thick bone there like a knife’s edge. “I’ve hardly been with anyone, period, and _trust me_ that is awkward in its own way, so we’re both ... bringing something shitty to the table here.”

“That’s a thoughtful way of putting it.”

"I’m being generous.”

“I know.”

One of Dave’s arms is trapped between them; he extracts it and flexes his fingers, then rests it on Karkat’s hip, lightly, not intimate. They smoked again before Dave showered and now Karkat is what he calls _gently_ _stoned_ , bearably so, a thrumming in his blood and dryness in his throat that makes everything tactile and sweet.

“That seems like forever ago,” he says softly, almost dozing off. “I didn’t even know who you were.”

“And _you_ were just Lux’s high school friend. ‘S funny,” Dave says, laughing quietly, marginally more stoned than Karkat if the way he kneads his hip is any indication, “I said you were cute and he told me to back off. So protective.”

Karkat snorts. “He told me the same thing about you.”

“What?”

“At that show, he misunderstood something I said about you and told me not to get into this, ‘cause you’ll hurt me.”

“What a dick.”

“Maybe he likes you.”

“Yeah fucking _right_. We've got a show on Thursday, let's let think of the most disgusting way to announce this to him."

Dave strokes from his hipbone down his thigh, lined against his, pressing firmly like he’s tracing a drawing. Karkat shifts closer and breathes into his hair, the afternoon sun heating his apartment to the point that sweat prickles where they touch, but he doesn’t move away. He half expects Dave to say _I’m not going to hurt you_ but how could he promise that, and why would he want to? Karkat wonders how bad it is that he doesn’t even care.

 


End file.
